This past weekend, I took the plunge and installed RockBox onto my Sansa e280 (8GB).  After fighting with my Vista PC and the RockBoxUtil (used for simple button click install), I finally switch over to my company provided Dell laptop with Windows XP still installed on it and was able to use the RockBoxUtil program without much of a fuss.

Once the RockBoxUtil worked its magic I had a RockBox enabled Sansa.  My first impressions?  Get a better default theme.  Seriously.  Get something with some pizazz.  I understand that a user can customize to their hearts content and make it look like however they want (including like an iPod), but the default theme is hideous.  In fact it’s not even really a “theme” at all.  It is just black text on a mostly white background.  Get something with a little more flash for that initial theme guys.

Once you get the look set up to your liking including theme, fonts, and icons.  You instantly have something that is better than the default Sansa interface (which, while it is alright, it is lacking).  The only thing I can not figure out is the proper size to make my “cover.bmp” files so I can have the album art on the screen.  Apparently you need some resizing patches that are not included by default to get RockBox to resize the artwork on the fly.  But this is a do-it-yourself install kind of thing and definitely not supported by Sandisk in anyway, so you take your good with the bad.

Overall?  I like it and have zero desire to return to the original Sansa firmware.  I will only load it to charge and sync the device.  Other than that I will be using RockBox exclusively.

Way to go guys.