Cowon S9 and Linux/Macs DO NOT MIX!

[Toonytoony]

Seriously. They should've tested this BEFORE they released it! Is it not a good idea to tell people not to buy these if they have unsupported OSes?

[CrowdAds]

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Toonytoony

Seriously. They should've tested this BEFORE they released it! Is it not a good idea to tell people not to buy these if they have unsupported OSes?

Have you tried MSC mode?

[rinzwind]

Originally Posted by Toonytoony

Seriously. They should've tested this BEFORE they released it! Is it not a good idea to tell people not to buy these if they have unsupported OSes?

Don't blame your lack in Linux on Cowon,

I use Ubuntu and have been using my S9 in both MTP (Amarok as sudo) and as MSC device. Not a single problem here.

[The DarkSide]

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

Have you tried MSC mode?

MSC mode IS the problem, and quite a few have had issues w/Linux w/the S9. It's not a rarity, it's the norm.

Those who have had a trouble free time, your in the minority it seems. And, FWIW, the issue ONLY occurs w/the 32gb S9, and that's it.

[scowl]

Originally Posted by rinzwind

I use Ubuntu and have been using my S9 in both MTP (Amarok as sudo) and as MSC device. Not a single problem here.

When our customers call us and say they have a problem, we investigate it, find the cause, and fix it. We don't tell them, "Sorry, but none of our other customers are having a problem. You must be mistaken." We like having customers.

My S9 no longer connects in MTP mode on any machine, Ubuntu, Fedora or CentOS.

[gsocker]

They don't seem to mix very well at the moment. Mine bricked on the first file copy.

Hopefully, they are trying to figure out the cause, as this appeared in my inbox a couple of minutes after the RMA number and instructions.

Dear Customer, To help us better assist you, when sending in your S9,
please indicate which operating system, kernel version, firmware version
on the S9 you were using when the problem occured. Also if the player
was formatted before and after, what type of format did you use? And
lastly, did this problem occur during a file transfer? Thank you.

[scowl]

And they probably did test it on Linux. They plugged it in, saw that it mounted, copied a few small files, unmounted it, and confirmed the S9 still worked. That's the amount of testing a lot of small companies do these days, especially the ones that don't have telephone numbers.

[SansaRulez83]

Originally Posted by rinzwind

Don't blame your lack in Linux on Cowon,

I use Ubuntu and have been using my S9 in both MTP (Amarok as sudo) and as MSC device. Not a single problem here.

Since when did companies start saying, "Hey, let's make the consumers jump through their asses to get their new device working!"

I have an S9 and a MacBook Pro and I can say that I've come to expect the S9 to crash on me. I get my whole library and some videos on there and about a month later I connect, disconnect, and bam the startup bar gets stuck at 25-30 percent. That's the most horrifying sight. Cuz i know I'll need to spend at least an hour getting everything back on.

Oh and Blueharvest doesn't help. It's supposed to prevent the Mac from introducing it's OSX hash file but the S9 still crashed right before my BlueHarvest trial ended. Oh well. At least videos are pretty on this thing.

[scowl]

Originally Posted by SansaRulez83

Since when did companies start saying, "Hey, let's make the consumers jump through their asses to get their new device working!"

Sometime in the mid-90's. I remember the USB update to Windows 95 was a lot of fun because the OS blue-screened every time you unplugged a USB device. People had lots of fun when DVD drives arrived because some people had their CD drives running in some goofy Windows emulation mode that made the DVD look like a CD drive no matter what you did.

I don't know how many times I had bought a new device that didn't work and was told by support to reinstall the OS, move PCI boards around, reinstall drivers, and simply waste hours of my life that never solved anything. That's when I switched to Linux since I or someone else was always able to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it.

[waldek]

Hi Guys,
I bought an S9, I use Linux, so the first thing I did I copied almost 16 GB of large avi files to it. No problems at all. Then I copied in one shot almost 16 GB of mp3 files - no problems either. Just to let you know.

cheers

waldek

[tarm]

I was wondering what Linux distro's people are having trouble with.
From what I've read on the forums, Ubuntu and Ubuntu off-shoots like Linux Mint work fine with the S9? I've been waiting to get a good idea before I get an S9. I use Linux Mint x64 and PcLinuxOS2009 primarily. XP for games only.

I think this information would be good to share.

[scowl]

There haven't been any fixes for the S9 in any distribution so it won't make any difference which one you use.

I copied another 500MB file over the weekend and the trick seems to be to umount the file system and wait for it to finish writing before unplugging. This can take up to ten minutes. It isn't a communication problem. If you wait ten minutes after copying and then umount, it happens instantly.

My S9 no longer works in MTP mode even though it's set to that mode.

[tarm]

Guess Cowon lost me as a customer. Too bad. I like that damn S9. Untill they fix linux support, it's now off my radar. Does the D2+ have the same issues?

[waldek]

I am afraid it has got nothing to do with Cowon. Probably the only improvement they could do would be to change the messge that is displayed on the screen as long as S9 is mounted to something that indicates it, "charging" is very misleading.
I do not know why some people had problems - assuming the device was unplugged before all data was written to it, if unmount is done from the console, it will not finish until all data is written to disk. If it is done from GUI just check with "df" if it is still mounted or not.

[gsocker]

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be limited to problems with being unplugged in the middle of data transfers. Mine started returning I/O errors right in the middle of the file copy while still plugged in. I could simply have had the bad luck to get one with a bad flash chip, of course.
I'll see what happens once it gets back from Cowon on Thursday.

For those of you who want to ensure that all data has been copied before unmounting:
Open up a terminal and run "sync".
Once this returns, all buffers have been flushed to the device.
Linux normally buffers writes and then flushes the buffer to disk: either every x seconds(default 30?) or when the buffer becomes full.

Unmount should then be immediate.

[scowl]

Originally Posted by tarm

Guess Cowon lost me as a customer. Too bad. I like that damn S9. Untill they fix linux support, it's now off my radar. Does the D2+ have the same issues?

The D2 is listed in Linux's unusual_devs.h in USB support so apparently people have had problems with it in the past and at least tried to work around them.

It wouldn't surprise me if the flash memory is the source of the problem. Haven't Linux and Mac owners have fewer problems with the 16GB model, the one with the cheaper memory card in it? The 32GB card is one of the most expensive components in the S9. It wouldn't surprise me if they found the cheapest supplier for these. Maybe I/O errors really are I/O errors.

The only problem I've had with the S9 is transfers taking a very long time to complete. 300-500MB will take several minutes but I'm patient. The device just sort of falls asleep and wakes up over and over, unlike any other USB storage device I've ever used.

Unfortunately the more I use the S9, the less I like it. I love that it supports FLAC and Vorbis, the screen is wonderful, it sounds great, the battery life is amazing but the UI is fundamentally flawed and the Claw UI is a collection of workarounds that don't solve much. I've owned several MP3 players since 2003 starting with the bulky Creative Jukebox but I've never had to press so many buttons to do simple things or remember to do things its way, not the way every other MP3 player I've owned does things.. It doesn't help that my fingers are too big for many of the tiny icons on the screen.

[gsocker]

Well, mine just got back from Cowon. They shipped me a new player, as the serial number does not match the one I wrote down. Since they appear to be capable of just reflashing them, mine probably did have an actual hardware problem. I've now copied more than the amount I did before the first one died.
scowl, what are you referring to when you say the device falls asleep and then wakes up? It's normal, in my experience, for file transfers to USB devices to freeze up temporarily while the kernel writes its buffer cache to the device. This leads to a pattern: copy until buffer is full, freeze until empty, repeat. Or are you referring to something else?

[gsocker]

Just bricked the replacement. At least I got to play with it a bit more this time.
Just copied a small amount at first.
After everything went well, I started loading the rest of my music collection - not all at once, though.
Got I/O errors at about 8.5GB used.
This time, the player started up slowly. Mounted it , and it had reformatted itself rather than displaying no fonts/no resources.
Turned it off and would not turn back on again.
This was with FW version 2.41.
Will talk to Cowon tomorrow.
If it bricks again after the second repair, I may sell it and get something else.

[scowl]

Originally Posted by gsocker

scowl, what are you referring to when you say the device falls asleep and then wakes up? It's normal, in my experience, for file transfers to USB devices to freeze up temporarily while the kernel writes its buffer cache to the device. This leads to a pattern: copy until buffer is full, freeze until empty, repeat. Or are you referring to something else?

Sure, some devices will do that for a few seconds, but not for ten long minutes. To test this I copied a 500MB file to an old Compact Flash card and write() never blocked for more than a few seconds while it was flushing. With the S9 a write() can block for several minutes. I don't know of any flash media that is that slow but apparently Cowan found some.

[gsocker]

Oddly enough, my old iHP-120 has almost exactly the same behavior during a large file copy. It's like the device accepts more than it can write in a reasonable amount of time, or the kernel has a huge write cache for it. I'd have "reset high speed usb device" several times in the log. However, it never died, and transfers did complete... eventually.
My original one apparently went to Korea for testing, according to tech support.
Looks like I'll have to boot my rarely used XP partition until they fix the problem.
I can't say transfers to my S9 froze for 10 minutes though, it was more like a minute or two, tops. I was limiting myself to a few hundred MB at a time, though.