I had forgotten about the disadvantage of not being able to sync while a program is running on the music partition. However, this is not a serious one in most cases if you set up your empeg properly. I still think that for the majority of applications /drive0 or /drive1 is the better place.

The majority of apps should be started from the player (for now using launcher, but very soon using code built into hijack) because if they are only occasionally used and you do not want them eating up RAM that you normally want available for the player to use to cache songs. Almost all user apps fall into this category of "occasional use" apps that do not need to be started on every boot, but only when selected from the hijack menu. So those already won't be running during a sync (because they only start if you select them).

Now you may want to start an app like GPSApp on every boot, but 99% of users can use a ;@DC "macro" so that it only starts in the car. So that's not running during a sync either.

Now we come to the final category of apps that you want started on every boot, even on AC power. I have my telnetd set to start from the menu because I don't use it very much, but so that we have an example, let's say I use telnetd every day and want it to start at every boot because it doesn't take up much memory anyway. If you sync frequently, this could be a situation where it's preferable to keep just telnetd on a different partition, however, I think I would just go prevent telnetd from starting on bootup by commenting out the line in the config.ini.

In short, keeping your programs on the "music" drives is still pretty slick because you don't have to reinstall anything when you upgrade. If you set up everything correctly such that you only start your apps from hijack (use launcher for the time being) and use ;@DC macros for the things you want booted every time, then you won't run into this problem. (I have ~6 things installed this way on my backup empeg and it seems to work fine without any sync errors.)

Once you introduce anything on the main drive (even a mount point) then you lose the ability to do a software upgrade without breaking things. (Note you'd still need to reinstall hijack.) I think that's a pretty cool concept and it certain makes things easier on those users who are hesitant to muck around at the shell, and faster and more streamlined for those who aren't.

EDIT: I just realized that I had to move launcher off the music drives for just this reason and I'd forgotten about it. For now, you can either leave only launcher on the main partition or comment out the ;@EXEC_ONCE launcher line and reboot before syncing. Note that this problem goes away 100% completely when mark finishes the launcher-style functionality in hijack (which is where it should be, because it's 90% the same as starting an app at boot). I believe mark is working on this now.

John