I have a Creative Zen X-Fi portable media player for some time now. I have managed to make it work with previous Ubuntu versions, but only after a lot of hard work of googling and meddling with the sytem.
I didn’t have the oportunity to test it with the latest Ubuntu since I upgraded everything to 9.04 up until a few days ago.
As with previous Ubuntu versions, 8.10 and 8.04, the Zen was not automatically recognized by any media player, or by Gnomad, which by the way is sooooo awful.
After doing some digging around in the ubuntuforums I found a way to make it happen.
The problem is that the version of libmpt (the library that makes things work) provided by the canonical repositories is an older one and does not support the player out of the box.
Running mtp-detect from the command line, connected to the player but seemed not to recognize it.
In the forums there was a reference for a PPA repository that contained more recent versions. I tried adding the repository to apt but could not get the libmtp package to upgrade (don’t know why). So, I simply downloaded the deb packages manually, libmtp8_0.3.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb, mtp-tools_0.3.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb, from here. Then I installed them manually with GDebi.
That did it. Running mtp-detect now, connected and recognized the player. So did Amarok, Banshee and Rhythmbox.
So, if you want to get your Createive ZEN X-Fi working under Jaunty then you simply have to manually install the 2 packages I mentioned above.
