Hi,

I am using SUSE Linux 9.1 and I am considering getting myself a portable mp3 player. All of them have Windows listed under system requirements, which means I wont be able to use the softwares that come with the player.

Are there other softwares that I can use instead? Or do I even need the softwares to transfer files to the mp3 player?

Most just show up as USB mass storage which is fine under linux. The ones you run into trouble with is iPods, iRivers and ones that use a proprietary DB format for their library. There are a lot of apps that work with iPods these days, I don't own an iRiver but I'm pretty sure I've seen apps floating around.

Thanks!

I wont get an ipod for sure (too expensive!). It'll probably be a SanDisk.

SanDisk make USB drives as well so chances are you shouldn't have any problems. Google around first but I'd be quietly confident

I have an Iriver flash one, took a bit of fiddling to get going but there is software out there for it.

Personally i'd go with something that works out of the box

I had a SanDisk m240, which I thought was really good though it's capacity is a bit small. 1GB is fine for me since I don't feel a need to carry around my entire music collection. Even though it says it requires Windows, I found linux treated like a regular usb drive and played music fine. The only problem was I couldn't access files loaded with a different OS. In general I thought it works great as long you don't do something stupid like leave it on a airplane after a flight arrives around midnight. I'm looking at a couple of players for a new one, other than buying anonther m240 some of the Zen players from Creative seem pretty good. I'm leaning towards either a Zen Nano, or spending a bit more for a Zen Neeon.