Operation Manual

Chapter 2. Installation 14

The Rockbox bootloader. The Rockbox bootloader is loaded from disk by the Packard

Bell bootloader. It is responsible for loading the Rockbox ﬁrmware and for provid-

ing the dual boot function. It directly replaces the Packard Bell ﬁrmware in the

player’s boot sequence.

The Rockbox ﬁrmware. Similar to the Packard Bell 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 appearance of Rockbox can be customised by themes. Depending on your

taste you might want to install additional themes to change the look of Rockbox.

2.2.1. Automated Installation

To automatically install Rockbox, download the oﬃcial installer and housekeeping tool

Rockbox Utility. It allows you to:

• Automatically install all needed components for using Rockbox (“Minimal Instal-

lation”).

• Automatically install all suggested components (“Complete Installation”).

• Selectively install optional components.

• Install additional fonts and themes.

• Install voice ﬁles and generate talk clips.

• Uninstall all components you installed using Rockbox Utility.

Prebuilt binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available at the ZRockboxUtility

wiki page.

When ﬁrst starting Rockbox Utility run “Autodetect”, found in the conﬁguration

dialog (File → Conﬁgure). Autodetection can detect most player types. If autodetection

fails or is unable to detect the mountpoint, make sure to enter the correct values. The

mountpoint indicates the location of the player in your ﬁlesystem. On Windows, this is

the drive letter the player gets assigned, on other systems this is a path in the ﬁlesystem.

The Rockbox manual (version 3.10) Packard Bell Vibe 500