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the Apple iPod is the same, as you have to use iTunes to copy music to it,

Huh? There's gtkpod, and a few others for Linux support.

Back to the original topic, there is gPhoto, which handles numerous digital camera transfer protocols other than the mountable file system paradigm. This includes quite a few Kodak models.

have you tried syncing with something that's not 5 years old?

Under Linux, no - has support been broken in the newer products?

There seem to be guides available, but I have not tried them.

You could also try GTKPod (it's in the repositories, but you'll have to dig a bit). It uses the Libgpod library like Rhythmbox, but is specifically designed to move files on and off the 'i' devices.

I never had a touch, but it works well for my shuffle.

There were already MP3 players on the market, but the iPod was the first one where the UI hadn't been cobbled together by a team of engineers with no interest in usability or polish.

True. But I've owned several iPods by now, and on each occasion where I've been shopping for an MP3 player, the amount of storage on the respective iPod offerings within my then affordable price-range has been sufficient in its own right to tip my decision in favour of the iPod.

Itunes definitely had nothing to do with my first purchase, since I only had access to Linux computers, so I used gtkpod exclusively to manage its files. But now that other manufacturers are beginning to catch up in the storage/dollar dept., I guess the interface is where it counts. But still, is there anyone offering a player with 160GB or more right now?

This leads me to another gripe: The iPod and its ilk.

How about iPodLinux? Or gtkpod if you don't want to go the whole hog. You have plenty of choices. The hardware's cool, and there are OSS options to use it. What's your problem?

I'm fed up of Apple's restrictive and prescriptive dictating of how I can and can't use my own products. I like my iPod Classic and I like my iPhone, but I can't use iTunes because I run Linux, and Apple of course say that is forbidden.

I've been using gtkpod to transfer music to the iPod Classic, but Apple have gone one extra step to ensure I can't use my iPhone that way under Linux. So if I use an OS Apple haven't rubber stamped I can't transfer music to my own phone. Thanks.

I'm looking forward to the day when Google pull all this together into an open Android device capable of replacing the iPhone/iPod.

Yep. There's absolutely no way to use an iPod under Linux

Now, don't you start your whining about your precious Ogg and FLAC or-anything-else-support neither!

Now STFU, you fucking Troll...

Doesn't help; libgpod is fully open source (LGPL), but still can't read iPhone/iPod Touch out of the box (requires jailbreaking).

Apple just likes being an ass.

gtkpod has "preliminary support for the iPhone and the iPod Touch but they must be jailbroken to work". Haven't tried it, though, as iTunes works great on my Macs.

I've had no problems getting older iPods to work with gtkpod, but 6G and have cryptographic hashes that still haven't been reverse-engineered yet.

I'm not quite sure what your point is. You don't need iTunes to put music on your iPod, either.

"At home, again, I thought I would probably finding myself switching back to windows to do certain things, but that hasn't been the case (I haven't tried to manage my iPod yet, though)."

Although I haven't tried this solution myself, apparently CrossOver Linux from CodeWeavers supports running iTunes. You might want to give it a try. Of course, make sure to have a good backup of your music and iTunes Library just incase.

As a alternate, you can try gtkPod, which runs natively on Linux. This article gives you a quick rundown on the program's features.

Good luck...

Oblig. disclaimer: I'm not associated in any way with CodeWeavers or the gtkPod project for that matter.

You pretty much answered your original question - iTunes comes with OS X (basically 100% of all Macs) and with every iPod (most popular DAP by far).

PCs don't come with iTunes installed though. PC users have to download and install it to use it on their PCs.

It is frustrating for those of us who want more choices that the iPod doesn't seem to function like most other DAPs in file management.

On principles I'd rather iPods and iTunes be more open but as a practical manner it doesn't matter to me. I don't have and don't plan on getting an iPod or any other mpg3 player. The last portable player I bought was a Walkman CD player years ago. I only used it when I roller bladed, unfortunately I stopped because my feet started bothering me too much, and when I rode my bike on a trail.

However I'd like to see more music released on vinyl records. I don't have one now but I want to get a new turntable, and reel-to-reel tape deck.

And Linux developers would not have bothered to create software iTunes like for Linux.

I don't really understand that statement - do you mean people are attempting to copy iTunes for Linux?

Developers would not have developed gtkPod if they didn't care to use iPods and import their iTunes library on Linux.

FYI, the switch from IE to Safari on Macs did not correlate with the switch to Intel CPUs - IE was discontinued and Safari was released in mid 2003, while Intel chips were not seen in Macs until 2006.

I don't recall when IE for Macs was dropped and Apple released Safari. It really doesn't matter to me much. I use Firefox. I started using it years ago on my Windows PC, then kept using it when I switched to first Linux then to Mac.

That one' s easy -- GTKpod. True no iTunes access yet, but then there are so many sources for mp3s now...

Been using http://www.gtkpod.org/ for a few years now with my 4G iPod, now with Fedora Core 6. Works flawlessly, but the dekstop program has weird sorting. You could also use udev rules to back up anything: http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/9311/

iPod requires iTunes to run. Sucks for Linux users, huh? (Yeah, I know you can kludge your way around it on Linux. Key word - kludge).

I wouldn't call running gtkpod a "kludge" any more than running iTunes is a kludge. You open the program, connect the device, transfer the songs to/from the device, and you're done. How's that a kludge?

No, it's not as easy as accessing it as a USB mass storage device like my iRiver, but it's no worse than using iTunes.

Not that it matters much, since you already picked up another DAP, but...

The idea that the iPod's sound is subpar is never substantiated. For example, the shuffle reportedly has excellent audio quality.

The iPod also shows up as a standard mass storage device, but it uses a database to store the music that it will play (probably to save on having to scan the device on boot to generate the tag based menus). It also works on Linux via gtkpod as well as other tools.

and iTunes is the only thing that works with it.

DRM probably has driven some key aspects of the design of iPod. For example, the fact that the iPod doesn't present its contents as a file system, like many other MP3 players do, is probably due to DRM.

FUD. The iPod shows up as a mass-storage device. All of the files on it can be read out of it with normal file-manipulation tools. The names of music files are obfuscated, but if they were tagged with the appropriate type of metadata before they were put there, it's not much work to throw together some scripts to give the files more sensible names. (You might find this utility I threw together useful...it's a command-line tagger that handles MP3 and AAC files (FLAC and Ogg Vorbis, too).)

The fact that it's hard to get music off the device is also driven by DRM concerns.

More FUD...see above, or look up any of the dozens of programs that automate the process. gtkpod is one example, and it even works under Linux. I used it just a few days ago to pull everything out of my iPod for a backup.

Likewise, the fact that the iPod does not support syncing to multiple machines well is probably influenced by DRM.

Still more FUD. I have no trouble manipulating the contents of my iPod from multiple machines. If you do, I suspect PEBKAC.

"Why doesn't Linux work with my iPod?"

Of course it works with iPod. Take a look at:

* GNUpod and gtkpod
* iPod Shuffle Database Builder

And then there's another one with a funky name I cannot remember.


I think your post, and the majority of other posts on this thread, serve to illustrate the fundamental disconnect that's in play here.

From GNUpod's home page: GNUpod is a collection of Perl-Scripts which allow you to use your iPod... If you really think this is what your typical person (you know, the type who have better things to do in the evening than sit around hacking Linux kernel modules) wants, then I don't think I can explain it to you.

gtkpod is much closer to what these "normals" would want. But it looks like there are still problems with iPod Mini support; you need a separate program to handle podcasts; there's no support for DRM'ed AAC (one of ESR's exact points, I believe); you have to use a different program to rip CDs to mp3/aac/whatever, and then manually import them.

Plus if you go to the troubleshooting links, you'll find "solutions" that talk about manually editing /etc/fstab. You may think "oh, this is simple stuff" (and for a lot of us, it is); but most people don't want to deal with the system at that level for something as trivial as getting an iPod to work! It's why a lot of Linux users (like me) defected over to OS X in the first place.

Frankly, I think ESR's thoughts on this are spot-on; and most of the posts here today are serving to prove his point, although the posters don't realize it.

"We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: 'Will it work with my iPod?," he said. "We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware."

If you can't find a way to sync your iPod with your Linux machine you haven't really been looking!

When will we get to mod articles "-1, Troll"?

..in various posts, let me summarize how the article's implication of poor ipod support is total bullshit and ipod works with linux just fine (in fact, better than with windows).

libipod ( http://libipod.sourceforge.net/ ) is the library that interacts with the database on the ipod that stores your music.

Several music players on linux like amarok ( http://amarok.kde.org/ ), rhythmbox ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/ ), gtkpod ( http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html ),( http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html ) etc have plugins/embeddings that can interact with the library seamlessly

Ipods are detected just fine by the USB mass storage driver with no probems in any modern linux distro.

Itunes can be run thru wine (though I've never tried it), and Sharpmusique
( http://nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/ ) can connect with itunes, buy music, download and strip off the DRM so that the files can be played anywhere.

CD-ripping and transfer to ipod can be done seamlessly in amarok (if you have lame etc installed). It's easier than in windoze thru third party rippers and itunes where there are all sorts of restrictions and issues.

Both "pc-compatible" (fat filesystem) as well as "mac-compatible" (HFS filesystem) will work equally well on any linux box coz linux has drivers for both filesystems.

Last but not least, there is ipodlinux ( http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page ), where you can install linux firmware in your ipod itself. Advantage is that you can play videos in your nano, music management is thru filesystem rather than database so just treat it as a mass storage device in any OS, and a host of other linux stuff will work on it, and you can play any music format that can be played on linux, not just mp3's (ogm,wma etc). You can even play quake on it if you want.

My nano ran just fine with my Mandrake box with no probs. Anecdotally, I had more problems with it on windoze (usb connection to it acted wierdly, though the usb bus was fine; I didn't care enough to analyze what was up).

Does anyone have any fucking clue what anyone else is talking about in this discussion? Have anyone here even tried to use an iPod under Linux? There's a dozen tools to do it, it's not like the iPod's database is rocket science, and there's a library to do it, which lists half a dozen projects using it, including amaroK, the most popular Linux mp3 player.

It's slightly more complicated than other mp3 players, where you can just drag and drop, but that's exactly as true under Windows. (And, under Linux, there apparently is, indeed, a user space filesystem that lets you drag and drop, although setting that up is more complicated than just using amaroK or Rhythmbox.)

The only shortcomings on Linux is you can't use iTunes and the Apple music store, which are, indeed, shortcomings, but they're hardly Linux's fault, or an iPod support issue. It's due solely to the fact that the Apple music store or whatever the name is, is limited solely to working within iTunes. The word 'iPod' didn't even appear in that sentence. If Apple would port iTunes to Linux, the store would work perfectly fine.(1)

If the question is 'Can I used my Apple purchased music in, and copy it to my iPod from within, Linux?', people under 30, the answer is 'No'. That music, as you probably were told when you purchased it, required a Mac or PC. If you do not use the Apple store, you are completely and perfectly supported under Linux.

And, as an added bonus, almost all music copy protection schemes either fail completely, aka, the autorun ones like the recent Sony debacle, or can be trivially corrected for, like the incorrectly formatted CDs designed to trick computers. (Most of the time this correction is automatic.)

1) Of course, they can't do that, because it would utterly trivial to crack iTunes's DRM on Linux. OTOH, it's utterly trivally to 'crack' it anyway by burning it to a CD and ripping it again. You can even use a single CD-RW repeatedly. (I'm not sure if there's such a trivial way to crack the video DRM, though.)

I happen to like gtkpod – http://www.gtkpod.org/ – and amaroK... I'm an iPod nano addict myself, so I've made sure it's included in Ultima Linux if anyone cares (I've also linked amaroK to libgpod, so it's got everything except a music store now... works just fine for me :-)

Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?

And the best bit is that I (and probably you soon) got moderated down for saying it.

What do you expect Linux devs to do? Magically support every bit of hardware in existance without decent specs and no access to the closed DRM which makes the bit people are most unhappy to leave behind tick? Yes, I am aware that the actual format is open, thank you very much, but the DRM is not and so purchased large music libraries are non-trivial to convert to something that works on any platform.

And yet the iPod does work on Linux (even the new ones). How about that for good service, and all for free I might add.

Doesn't the iPod show up as a mass storage device when you plug it in?

It does.

In which case can't you load music into it in a platform-agnostic fashion?

With the stock firmware, no. The files are all there (usually with scrambled names if iTunes put them there), but there's a file (iPod_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB) that contains all of the metadata and that tells the iPod which file to play for which song. On Linux, ipodslave and gtkpod provide compatible, but limited, functionality. (gtkpod doesn't know a thing about podcasts or cover art.)

Rockbox is supposed to work on newer iPods. I've not tried it out yet, but my understanding is that you can just dump a bunch of files onto a Rockbox-equipped iPod (or other device) and it'll play them. It's also supposed to coexist with Apple's firmware (dual-boot between the two).

Thank you very much for your info.
I also just found gtkpod. I will try them out.

And if all you want to do is use the blasted iPod on Linux without taking any of the firmware-tampering risks, you can simply use gtkpod.

BTW, anyone else noticed that the article says "I'd been familiar with Rockbox through postings about it on Slashdot..." ?

First, here are the two unequivocal facts you mention:

Have integrated FM radios. You're right about this, and I'd certainly like to see it. I will point out that a decent radio would add to the cost and complexity of the interface, and some people may not appreciate that.

Allow music to be uploaded from any PC, without having install special software to do so. Correct again, though I will point out as long as the software is free, this is not a tremendous impediment for most people. However, I agree it is disadvantagous for people who run any OS that is neither windows nor OS X. Even so, there are non-officially sanctioned solutions, such as this.

Next, to address your distortions:

Smaller. Maybe some are, maybe some aren't; maybe those that are smaller are less capable, or more expensive, or uglier, or have an unpleasant interface. In any event, this certainly doesn't seem to be a limiting factor in customer acceptance based either on the sales numbers, or on converstions with any of the dozens of iPod owners I know.

Have battery lives that match vendors claims. Granted, there was a lawsuit about this, and I believe Apple is more forthright now because of this. Nevertheless, for most people, it doesn't matter. Let me digress into real-world numbers based on my own experience. My 2G 20GB had a battery life that ranged from more than 10 hours when I got it (refurb) to about 3-4 hours after more than two years of almost daily charge/recharge cycles. My wife's 3G 10GB (also refurbed) maintained a charge for more than 10hr over its entire lifespan of about 1.5 years. Neither of these are still with us, due to no fault of Apple. Our replacements (a 1 year old Shuffle, a 4GB Nano, and a 4G 60GB Photo (the latter two are about .5 year old)) are all still going strong with more than 10hr per charge. Why do I keep referring to that mystical 10hr figure? Because for us, and probably the vast majority of people, that's long enough. I don't spend my entire day listening to my iPod to the exclusion of all other activities that require the use of my ears. As long as an overnight charge gives me enough juice to last through the next day, I'm satisfied, and I'm pretty sure most people feel the same way. Also, not everyone wants to deal with the hassle of swapping out "replacable" batteries all the time, even if they use rechargable ones.

Dont scratch. Well, my 2G, 3G, and 4G are pretty scratch resistant (as much as I'd expect them to be, anyway), and the Shuffle is certainly more than adequate under reasonable usage. I concur that the Nano is considerably less tolerant of abrasion, and I admit I'm not very pleased about it. However, it's clearly impossible for ANY player to be completely unscratchable (unless perhaps it's made of somthing exotic like diamonds).

Finally, your falsehoods:

Dont cost $50 to replace the failing battery. Well, that's just silly. Most people don't assume that the original vendor will be the least expensive option; in Apple's case, this is rarely true. However, they are definitely not the only option for replacement batteries. One that I have no relationship to (except as a satisfied customer) can be found here. If you glance at the page, you'll see that no replacement battery tops $30, and most of these are rated for longer lives than Apple's originals. As referenced above, this shouldn't be necessary under even pretty heavy usage more often than once every 1.5-2 years, which is not an incredibly large expenditure for a product that costs about ten times that much.

Dont attempt to lock users into Apples music format and the iTunes store. Yeah, I hate it when the

I know it's not perfect, but it seems no one is mentioning the open source iTunes-ish app, gtkpod. Syncs great with iPods and does most of the work that iTunes does (minus the ripping).

Link: http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html

Getting a decent music player that does OGG and normal USB mass transfer is still not cheap or easy. The Xiph list is informative. Iriver players are one of the few ogg players widely available. They don't do USBfs out of the box, and I suspect most "works for sure" players suck that way and you won't find a good cheap player down the street in the US. This leaves you needing to copy your music to mp3 in order to enjoy any of the bazillion cheap portable music players out there but available music managers don't deal with this very well. Even then, finding a player that also works with USBfs is hit and miss.

PDA's running Familiar, OZ or whathave you may provide a better route to music than music players do.

Maybe i'm lucky, but OO 2.0 imported every single Office document i've throwed at it perfectly. My epson inkjet printer works flawlessly, GIMP fulfils my (basic, admitedly) image editing needs just fine, and even my POS Concord webcam works. You can use your iPod just fine. I haven't tried iTunes on Wine, but i did try Maple and it worked perfectly. So did Orcad, another software package i used quite a lot.

    It is good enough for most people, and that's right now. Of course you'll find a lot of Windows software that won't work correctly on *nix that you might need, but as a whole, it's good enough for a basic desktop. And that's ignoring the shitload of perfectly good *nix software that isn't available on Windows either. Again, you can use Linux as a desktop. Today.

(a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. This subsection does not apply to-- ....
(2) importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to copies or phonorecords forming part of such person's personal baggage; or ....
(b) In a case where the making of the copies or phonorecords would have constituted an infringement of copyright if this title had been applicable, their importation is prohibited. In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless the provisions of section 601 are applicable.

The iPod does "just show up as a HD", and you can access it fully with an assortment of GPLed software packages (gtkpod for one).

And the iPod does offer an FM tuner, if you want to pay $49 for the remote. Not really sure why you'd want such a thing though.

As for recording, good luck finding 2 jacks on any portable audio player. I don't even think there's a minidisc or portable DAT model that does that.

The only MP3 player that I know of which will work with a non-FAT filesystem is the iPod, which on the Mac can be formatted as HFS/HFS+. Unfortunately, I don't think this is really going to help you as a Linux user, as you'll probably need a Mac to reinitialize/reformat the iPod to use HFS/HFS+, may need to install extra software to be able to

The iPod looks like any other usb-storage device to a Linux system. In order to switch the iPod to HFS+ using a Linux system, you will need to compile support into your Kernel for "Apple's Extended HFS File System" and "Macintosh partition map support" which is available in both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. You will also need HFSUtils which are installed with Slackware (I don't know about other distros).

mount HFS/HFS+ partitions under Linux, and will need to run iTunes through some sort of emulator to manage your music. Ick.

Or you could use one of the open source iPod applications such as gtkpod, gnupod, mypod, or one of many others. I've only used GTKPod which has worked great for me.

Why Windows?

Note that I'm not trying to convince you to use Linux, but I do want to correct some things:

- hibernate works.

Works fine on most laptops running Linux as well, though if you want to use the BIOS-driven hibernation, you may have to create the hibernate file from Windows. Personally, I really like the new Linux software suspend, in which the Linux kernel does the hibernation. It's faster and more flexible (including working on machines that don't have hibernation support). It's not, at present, easy to set up, though.

- sleep works.

Interestingly, in my experience, this actually works *better* with Linux than with Windows. My colleagues running Windows don't use sleep mode much, because our machines (various Thinkpad T40 series laptops) sometimes don't wake up. So they all shut down their OS. With Linux, I just close the lid, and have done so with several generations of laptops.

- laptop undock works.

Having never seen the point of docking stations, I can't comment here.

- wireless automatic network connection/disconnection/hunting works.

I think there are tools that solve this, but I can't really comment because I just use the command-line tools and script things to work the way I want them to. You may have a point here, I'm not sure.

- windows automatically searches for new network parameters when waking up on a foreign network.

You mean like DCHP? So does Linux. Actually, there are some nifty tools on Linux that will attempt to guess how to configure the network interface even when DHCP doesn't work.

- changing display resolution doesn't require a logout/login.

Doesn't on Linux any more, either. Changing color depth still does, though.

- my iPod works.

I don't have an iPod, but this claims to work on Linux.

- I can read the unfixated CDRs that my Sony camera produces.

I don't have a camera that does that, so I can't really comment. That said, I would be very, very surprised if Linux couldn't deal with that as well.

- I can use IE to view those few sites/use those web apps that require it and use firefox for everything else.

Yeah, those sites suck. I run IE under WINE on my Linux box to deal with that. Works fine, even though I mutter through my teeth every time I'm forced to do it.

If your wife doesn't use iTMS, there are Linux sync solutions, e.g. gtkPod. Have you tried them?

amaroK

gtkpod

These all transfer/generate playlists and files for ipods connected to linux machines.

No you don't.You can use gtkpod instead of iTunes.

My media box is a Linux box....everything I own is ripped into lossless .flac format...I just run a quick perl script to convert to mp3...then will load the iPod with something like gtkpod. My mac laptop is an older one..and dual booted with Linux too..so, no storage space on it for iTunes...and I won't buy any songs online that only available if a lossy format. I listen to my home system in formats that are the best I can get...but, for a poor listening environment, such as places I'd use the iPod (gym, car, etc)...the mp3 format is just fine.