Music, Free Software and Bad Jokes

I own an Archos 5 portable media player. It’s a great piece of hardware based on an ARM Cortex CPU, it plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC encoded music and it runs a proprietary firmware on top of a Linux system. Unfortunately, Archos has a very strict policy prohibiting homebrew applications on their devices so they can charge extra for every new feature.

Luckily the GPL forces them to publish large parts of the firmware source code. Apparently, they’re not particularly enthusiastic about it, though - I had to view the HTML sources of their support web site to find the link for the Generation 6 (i.e. Archos 5 and Archos 7) firmware:

http://www.archos.com/support/download/software/sources/AX06_GPL.tar.bz2

Given the premises, I mirrored it on my own server, just in case:

http://www.discarded-ideas.org/files/AX06_GPL.tar.bz2

The source tarball is a ~270MB download; unpacking and building it worked out-of-the-box on my Linux PC and required nearly 3GB of free hard disc space. There’s no easy way, however, to run your own firmware because, just like its predecessors, the player will only run binaries signed by Archos. Still, I’m interested in anything that can be done with it, so I’m putting up the firmware for your hacking pleasure.

Have fun!

Update (2009-04-26):
The link to the firmware files is now available at the Archos support site: http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates.html. Click the “show” button underneath the GPL notice and you’ll see the licence statement as well as download links for various Archos player firmware sources. I’ve been told that this has been there for a while, so maybe their site was broken, or my browser was. Anyway, happy hacking!