On 6/27/07, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: I would think there would be no difference made between peripherals and CPUs of a given vintage or "coolness". I think what's at issue here is that technically, the PMP300 is nine years old, so it has to squeeze in by nature of its place in history, not its mere age. AFAIK, it was the second model to market, but the first widely available one. Ow! FLASH sure was expensive then... but so were all of Diamond's other products. Here's what I've been using for years to pump and dump music on my Rio PMP300 (from the README) RIO utility v1.07 - The Snowblind Alliance (c) 1999 I did run into a parallel-port permissions issue with RedHat WS3 last year, but under RedHat 9, the ancient Rio utility worked perfectly. I think it's just a matter of tweaking the rio.cpp to open the parallel port with a more modern technique - the port banging code should work fine after that. If not, then there's a reason to stick with an "obsolete" version of Linux - to get unfettered I/O port access. :-/ Your feelings about it reminds me that I'm glad I didn't get one when they were _totally_ new. I paid at least $100 for mine, since, ISTR, I was concerned that the RIAA lawsuit over potential violations of the 1992 Home Recording Act might make them unavailable. Fortunately for us all, that one was settled in favor of Diamond. I still use mine. I was given an iPod Shuffle that I don't use much because embedded non-user-replaceable Li-Ion batteries annoy me. I have a removable NiMH AA in my PMP300, which means it won't be dying of battery fatigue anytime soon (I use my Palm III in favor of my Palm V for the same reason). I do have a half-dead one, that I'd love to repair... it was free from the previous owner because as far as we can determine, one of the FLASH chips is defective. I think it stores songs, but not the full amount - there's a dead zone in the internal 32MB map. Simple fix once one identifies which chip it is, and locates a spare. -ethan