Adventures in Switching to Linux

I have seen that a few people have had problems getting the new Amazon MP3 Downloader for Linux working for them. See here and here.

Although I didn't have any problems on my main home system (Ubuntu 7.10), I did have problems on my Ubuntu system at work. The difference is that my system at work is running Firefox 3.0b3. (The other difference may be the download destination though, hmm...)

The problem I have seen has to do with the .amz file that is downloaded. Once it is downloaded the downloader is launched with the downloaded file passed in. The problem I have seen is that if the file is read-only, it will not work. The worst part is the downloader doesn't give you any errors or anything. It just fails silently. I think the problem with it not working is Amazon needs to be able to delete the file as soon as it starts downloading to keep you from downloading multiple times using that file.

So just change the .amz file you downloaded from read-only to read-write and open it again in the Amazon MP3 Downloader. Then, enjoy your new DRM free tunes in Linux.

I really hope Amazon fixes this issue in a release soon or at least changes the application to give the user some feedback instead of failing silently. Of course the bigger question for me is why are files I download being set as read-only sometimes but not others? The FAQ doesn't even provide any help yet.