You've probably seen articles on the net about using the Zune with Linux and the pitfalls and such of using it. I am here to tell you a quick and dirty way to use the Zune on Linux...this is of course assuming you actually have a copy of Windows to use, because apparently Microsoft can't be bothered to conform to their own MTP standard (is that really a surprise?). It's actually a pretty quick and painless process so strap in and take note. Hopefully you've got a copy of Windows to use for this because of the aforementioned non-compliance with standards and such. This naturally means that none of the Linux players can even PLAY things off the Zune, much less copy music or video to them.
First things first here. Regardless of which Linux distro you're using (I'm on Gentoo myself), you need to get get Virtualbox. There are 2 different versions: a binary version and a fully open source version. The binary version is supposed to have more features and quite honestly, I'm not all that picky, so I just went with that. Probably saved me a lot of time compiling. Now I'm not going to go into great detail on HOW to install and use Virtualbox as that's outside the scope of this article, but I assure you that a quick Google search for Your distro of choice and "Install Virtualbox" will get you all you need to know. Ubuntu users are probably looking for apt-get virtual box and gentoo users such as myself will use "emerge virtualbox-bin" if you're going to use the same one as me. If you want the fully open source one, use virtualbox-ose for your package. Just know that you'll have to install MORE packages and it will take 10x as long to do it. When you're done with this, you'll want to do a "modprobe vboxdrv" to actually load the kernel driver for Virtualbox. It took me a minute to figure that out when the program complained about this as I tried to start it up. Also note that the current Gentoo version still doesn't support the video acceleration, so I'd highly recommend installing XP and not Vista or Windows 7 (the latter of which crashed when I tried to install it...go figure).
When you've got that installed, go ahead and start up Virtualbox and go to "New." Choose the settings...it's all relatively straightforward here so you know...choose what makes sense, choose a decent hard disk size (you ARE installing an OS here after all...you might want to use it for other stuff that doesn't run in Linux...i.e. MS Office). After you've run through that whole process, right click your new virtual machine and click "Settings." From here you will want to go to the USB tab and enable USB support for your virtual machine.
Now at this point, you will most likely want to go ahead and just set yourself up to have shared folders so that the virtual machine can access your music. Go to the "Shared Folder" area and start adding folders to there by hitting the "Add New Folder" button. When you're done, you should have something similar to what I do:
As the instructions right there in this particular settings area imply, you simply need to add a network drive here to give yourself access to the shares you just gave yourself. We'll get to that AFTER we install XP and the Zune software.
Okay, so you've got Virtualbox installed and you're installing XP, right? Now get that all going, get any updates you want to snag, and install the Zune software. You may need an update to Windows Installer for this...or the installer will complain, you'll launch the updater for it which tells you (if you're using SP3) that it's too new, and then you'll go back to the installer and it will work fine...just like I did. Whatever, just jump through the hoops here and get your software installed.
Now after you've got Windows XP going and you've installed the Zune software, let's install the VBox drivers package. At the top of your Virtual Machine go to the "Devices" menu -> "Mount CD/DVD Rom" -> "CD/DVD Rom Image." In this dialog simply choose the "VBoxGuestAdditions.iso" file and hit select. This will make the installer start so that you can use the features specifically provided to you by the virtual machine (such as not needing to press a key combo to break out the mouse and kb and being able to use shared folders). Once you've completed the install simply find your shares by opening Windows Explorer and clicking "My Network Places." Once you're here go into the address bar and type in "Entire Network" and hit enter. You'll see a "Virtualbox Shared Folders" server in there.
Once you're in there, you should see your shares. You can either just go into them or you can right click and choose "Map Network Drive" (which you REALLY need to do for the Zune software) and then map it to whatever drive letter you want to. I mapped one of my drives to Z and another to Y. Now at this point, you've got your Zune software loaded, your network share mounted as a Z drive or something similar and you are ready to enable your Zune inside of Windows. Go to "Devices" -> "USB Devices" -> and then check the name of whichever Zune you have (or hell any music player you might want to use this tutorial for). It will give it a check box and then Windows will go nuts installing drivers and such with it. I had to wait a while but eventually, it got the point. Start your Zune software and just wait a minute and it will eventually see your Zune. Be wary here, because you've enabled USB 2.0 support, things are a bit buggy. However, in contrast to what the rest of the net will tell you, it WILL still work, but you might get a bluescreen here or there. I personally only experienced one when trying to delete all the shit off my Zune (because I wanted to test file copying for all of you! LOVE ME!!) but other than that things are golden:
And that should do ya. Set up your Zune software just like you normally would, remembering to set it up to use that share you put in for the folders it scans (it can be to a Linux folder, or like I did...a samba mount from my Windows partition...Windows existing almost solely for me to game on these days). Everything is working quite smoothly for me, quite to my surprise, and that's why I decided to write this...in case anyone was afraid it wouldn't work or did what everyone ELSE said and ran the damn thing in USB 1.1 mode...and is using VMWare. So there you are, free tool, easy set up, and it works with USB 2.0...giving you a significantly shorter file copying time. If you've got any questions or suggestions here, feel free to leave a comment. I'm open to any and all suggestions for changes/additions to this tutorial. If I've left something out, I definitely would like to be made aware of that. If something needs to be clarified better, I'd be more than happy to!
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Seems like an obvious hack and a trivial use for an expensive gadget, but I’m sure there are some people out there that will find this useful. I have found the same article at torrent search Thanks.
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