Chapter 2.
Installation
11
2 Installation
2.1 Overview
There are two ways of installing Rockbox: automated and manual. While the manual
way is older, more tested and proven to work correctly, the automated installation is
based on a nice graphical application that does almost everything for you. It is still
important that you have an overview of the installation process to be able to select the
correct installation options.
There are three separate components, two of which need to be installed in order to
run Rockbox:
The Toshiba bootloader.
The Toshiba bootloader is the program that tells your player
how to load and start the original firmware. It is also responsible for any emergency,
recovery, or disk modes on your player. This bootloader is stored in special flash
memory in your Toshiba and comes factory-installed. It is not necessary to modify
this in order to install Rockbox.
The Rockbox bootloader.
The Rockbox bootloader is loaded from disk by the Toshiba
bootloader. It is responsible for loading the Rockbox firmware and for providing
the dual boot function. It directly replaces the Toshiba firmware in the player’s
boot sequence.
Note:
Dual boot does not currently work on the Gigabeat.
b
The Rockbox firmware.
Similar to the Toshiba firmware, most of the Rockbox code is
contained in a “build” that resides on your player’s drive. This makes it easy to
update Rockbox. The build consists of a directory called
.rockbox
which contains
all of the Rockbox files, and is located in the root of your player’s drive.
Apart from the required parts there are some addons you might be interested in
installing.
Fonts.
Rockbox can load custom fonts. The fonts are distributed as a separate package
and thus need to be installed separately. They are not required to run Rockbox
itself but a lot of themes require the fonts package to be installed.
Themes.
The view of Rockbox can be customized by themes. Depending on your taste
you might want to install additional themes to change the look of Rockbox.
The Rockbox manual
Toshiba Gigabeat F Series