The offspring each got themselves a fancy new Sansa Fuze this year for Christmas. Lucky! It's a wonderful little device easily recognized by your Debian and easy to add tunes and videos. But you gotta do a thing or 2 first. Too easy. Listen...

Get yourself atunes. If you use Rhythmbox it will see your device but it's painfully slow. aTunes worked a charm so I didn't look at any other managers for the device. go ahead. Knock yourself out.

When you first turn the device on it wants you to go into the settings. Go ahead. Change the time, all that. Do what you like. But, make sure to go into the system settings --> USB mode --> and choose MSC. Your Debian box will see it all day now and you can manage it as you like.

In aTunes you can manage your music all day long and it's pretty simple to get up and running with it. Go ahead, try it.

Video on the device is apparently persnickety. (lol, when is the last time you heard that word?) It wants a very specific .avi apparently but I still added various .flv, .avi, .mov files just to know. The avi files were at least seen but they still registered an error with the device. No matter. I know it's simple enough so I play with handbrake and winff.

WinFF choked and HandBrake converted but not to the Fuze's specs. I consult Google and I find video4fuze quickly enough and after installing and playing with it for about 8 seconds video for the device is now a done deal.

Every conversion worked fine and now the kids can rot their brains on the go. Aww, we rule.

For you and me, the Sansa Fuze is a wicked little device. Works a charm on our Debian boxes and the interface is pretty fluid, too. I was working it immediately and life was sweet. We had ipods, the lot of us. Bah! We're feeling a whole lot smarter and 'convenienced' with the fuze. And how handy is buying a $40 card loaded up with hundreds of tunes? If you're into that.

Yeah, that's pretty handy.

Rock on.