Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat

>Bottom line: firmware v1.04.06 doesn’t work under Linux; v1.06.01 does.

I purchased a Creative Zen Mozaic media player for my wife’s birthday. Even though we run Linux at home, I wasn’t afraid of the player being MTP-only since MTP is supported on Linux. However, I was in for a shock: « dmesg » was returning errors when pluging the device and it was not listed when issuing « lsusb ». I have three different computers at home with different distros and architectures (i586 and AMD64), and all were giving me the same dmesg errors. Kernel bug? Firmware bug? Mere incompatibility? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t even try with Windows under Virtualbox in Linux since a USB device needs first to be seen by Linux in order to be made available under Windows in this manner.

So I was in for installing Windows in dual boot on one of my computers, which in my case meant destroying all my partitions first and therefore reinstalling Linux as well (WindowsXP will refuse to install itself on a partition that is too far from the root of the disk). So I did, and the Mozaic was working fine under Windows. The Creative software detected automatically that there was a firmware upgrade for the Mozaic and offered me to install it; I accepted. Everything went smoothly. The old firmware was v1.04.06, and the new one was v1.06.01.

The story could have stopped here but for the fact that I retried the Mozaic under Linux after my fresh reinstall, and to my suprise it was working perfectly; I had no trouble at all to transfer MP3s from Amarok 1.4.