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How to Use Your iPod Under Linux
Jon writes "For those lucky readers who received an iPod for Christmas I've put up an article on LinuxLookup.com on how I got my iPod working under Linux. I've given a little overview on the different options available, and which one worked best for my needs. All in all, I'm extremely happy with the outcome. I can transfer my music, create playlists, and add all of my contacts. The only thing missing is a nice GUI."
I don't know about you, but I was planning on being evil with my iPod. Pirating music, harvesting the Anarchists Cookbook, etc. Naturally I wouldn't do this under any other operating system.
Is that for Linux, or for the iPod??? ;-)
I didn't get an iPod, I got an Archos 20 Recorder. Records directly into the devide through various inputs and it records into MP3! I love it!!!! Does the iPod let you record? I'm just curious.. I haven't used an iPod
Did you fail reading comprehension in school? What this guy did was get Linux to transfer files to/from his iPod. He didn't make Linux run on the iPod. Dumbass!
20GB iPod: $499 20GB Nomad Zen: $299 (w/rebate) Apple is smoking crack on the iPod pricing. The 5GB one should be no more than $99-$149. How much can a 5GB hard drive cost these days? $15 on eBay?
It's the secret greeting of software/music pirates. They usually use it when talking to each other, but sometimes they let it slip in public.
"ALL IN ALL" means: "We want ALL software and music IN ALL our hard drives".
Quite shameful really, if these guys didn't steal software and music, prices would be lower and quality would be higher.
Site appears to be slashdotted already? What's the point in submitting your self-authored article
to a community that you can expect to hammer your server into oblivion?
Sigh.
There was a time, not long ago, where Apple made interesting, even innovative technology--but designed it so it worked only with its Macintosh hardware.
It's great for the industry and many others that Apple is slowly crawling out of the mindset that all of their products must work strictly with a Mac. Their move to Mac OS X would be contradictory to such a philosophy since *nix is a widely supported and tinkerable OS.
The iPod is mostly a glorified FireWire drive, so this software doesn't impress me as much as the relative enthusiasm of developers to make it work. Even if you don't use it, Mac OS X and the iPod is a nice catalyst for a drab, uninventive computer industry at the moment.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Kneejerk response #1: Yeah, but what good does that do me if all my files are .OGG?
Although I'd seriously consider going through and re-ripping all of them if I had the money... The iPod is just one of the coolest little gadgets I've seen in a while - especially the clean interface.
Has Apple indicated any wish to support alternate compression? A quick Google didn't find anything.
I suspect Apple should start researching OGG, as it seems much more likely than MP3 to remain un-DRM-contaminated... and Apple seems to be placing itself in the position of "use our computers - no stupid DRM!"
I also wonder if Apple could be persuaded to issue a release of iPod software for Darwin... that way it could more easily be converted.
"The only thing missing is a nice GUI."
*avoids smart alec temptation to link to apple.com
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
It's a meta-recursive acronym. It means, "All-in-all In All-in-all".
Best Windows Freeware
I am about to purchase an mp3 player. Any suggestions on what to get, and why?
http://use.perl.org
I just can't justify the price. Sure it's sleek and sexy, sounds great, has multiple interfaces for data transfer, but it's priced at least a couple hundred $$ above the competition.
For $229 (BestBuy $279 + $50 mail in rebate) I'm very satisfied with my Archos Jukebox Recorder 20.
It has 20GB HD, USB 1.1,2.0, and comes bundled with Music match Jukebox.
My wife uses it mostly, so it's only seen Windoze, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long for me to get it working with Linux. If someone hasn't done it already.
"No Matter Where You Go.. There You Are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Why, I bet it does! Of course, since the iPod can only play mp3 files you're shit out of luck now aren't you? You might as well upload jpegs.
I put up this iPod Comparison Chart/site for those looking to compare the iPod with other hd based players.
While it hasn't been updated since the 20gb units w/remote came out, it does allow for review of more elements than most buyers ever consider (also tips, links and related trivia).
Bottom line...FireWire is the only way to go (transfers and charging), and at 7 oz., an iPod will truly fit in your pocket. And yes, the new remote is backwards compatible...just be sure to update your iPod.
Apparently the site is already /.'ed. Here's a way to get it working with a nice GUI.
;). Be sure to have SCSI compiled in or as a module!! Also be sure to inlude the HFS (if you've got the mac version) or msdos/vfat (for windows ipod) if you don't want to reformat your ipod. Reboot with you new kernel.
/var/log/messages and plug in your ipod and wait for the magic :) You should see Apple iPod being added as a (5/10/20)GB SCSI disk. Add a mount point for the drive in /etc/fstab using vfat if you've got windows or hfs if you've got a mac. You should now be able to access the iPod as a removable SCSI drive! modprobe -r sbp2 to safely remove the ipod (you have to unmount it first, too).
I'm using the latest stable kernel (2.4.20). 1394/ohci/sbp2 are all working great. Be sure to check "prompt for development drivers", then add the 1394 module and be sure to add OHCI and sbp2 (these also help if you're into dv
modprobe the 1394 and ohci modules. Do a tail -f on
Now, for the GUI. Download ephpod. Install it using wine (wine ephpod.exe). Change your wine config (probably ~/.wine/config) to use wherever you mounted your ipod as a drive. Startup ephpod. Be sure you've added some nice fonts to your wine install.
Enjoy!
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
The problem is not getting oggs in the ipod, the problem is getting the ipod to play them. This would require a firmware upgrade from either apple, or some very smart people.
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Cool information.... But isn't it usually sufficient (and easier) to just stick squid in front of the web server?
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
What exactly makes you think that? I'm not a huge PHP fan, but the site could be running any number of load balancers (software or hardware) in front of its backend. Additionally, PHP can scale to very high concurrency, it just needs to be tuned correctly. Your precious "flat-file-serving" Apache can only serve 150 simultaneous clients out of the box if you haven't tuned it.
Now I know you're talking out your ass, because if you had any experience at all with Oracle, you wouldn't have stated this. I suppose Amazon, Yahoo, CNN, et al aren't able to scale? The simple fact of the matter is that, like any other piece of software, how you tune your applications goes a long way to how many simultaneous threads you can serve up.
I think you really underestimate the true power of the Slashdot effect. What's likely happening in this situation is that Apache is buckling under the thousands of simultaneous requests, many of whom are coming from modem users -- using up precious processes to download the content. I seriously doubt that, if this person is running a 500MHz or greater machine, that processor time is an issue at all. What he/she needs to do is re-tune Apache to serve more simultaneous requests.
That is one of the harder things to do, believe it or not -- you're venturing into the realm of a more fully-featured content management system at that point. What if your content changes on a regular basis? What if, like Slashdot, the comments are dynamic?Not out of the box it won't. Read your own httpd.conf and look up "MaxClients" and "KeepAliveTimeout". Out of the box, MaxClients is set to 150, and KeepAliveTimeout is set to 15 seconds. Once you hit the 150 MaxClient threshhold, the performance of your webserver will be terrible, because you'll be waiting 15 seconds between unique client requests.
Ic, and what did you write to help the community today? None? Thank you!
"All in all" is slang for an orgy. You know, one with no holes barred.
example.org - powered by Linux!
You're sig will fall on deaf ears with the /. crowd, and your a fool to think otherwise. Most people would of realized that by now.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thanks for sharing your expert knowledge of httpd.cond.dist.
XSL is not yet mature enough to replace good ol'-fashioned Java (that was a weak attempt at humor). It simply is too time-consuming to build templates to handle anything more than the simplest error-checking. XSL only has the most basic of variable support, and writing a "function" in XSL is somewhat akin to using an iPod as a PDA-- you can do it, but why not just use the real thing?
Additionally, the only reason that they don't continue to run in "regular news mode" above that 100k threshhold is cost. Their server farm is perfectly capable of handling 10x the requests, but CNN has mandated that they aren't willing to spend the money in maintenance costs.
Your example of the charts on finance.yahoo.com is a bad example; "pre-generated files" is a misnomer-- Yahoo is simply telling their application servers to cache that information for a few minutes. This is, once again, a great example as to why a well-tuned application server is far superior to serving flat content.
The Creative Nomad Zen is sleek and small, and supports both FireWire and USB, as well as recharging through USB.That alone makes it a much better choice for Linux users than the iPod. It also seems to have somewhat better battery life, and it supports recording.
I thought that the difficulty in finding OGG compatability in portable players wasn't that all the makers were being "evil" and trying to suppress the new "free" format.
I thought it was because most portables use integer-only CPUs to save that little bit more money. And while there ARE integer-only deconders for MP3s, there aren't for the Vorbis codec.
Is this no longer true, or am I caffeine defficent and wrong in the first place?
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
OK, I already know the answer to this one: Because you CAN!
However, from a practical point of view, I can't imagine any reason to run Linux on a box that comes with a very tightly (and well) designed BSD Unix OS.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Get a Nomad Zen instead. It has both FireWire and USB interfaces, slightly longer battery life, and it supports recording. Or consider the new Archos players and recorders: USB2, FireWire, and lots of other features.
When I first skimmed the headline for this story, I was saying to myself: "Wow, cool! They have iPod tools for Linux? Maybe I can get them to compile under Mac OS X!"
Breakfast served all day!
As I said, the Archos MP3 player works GREAT under Linux. When I connect it via USB it automatically loads and is mounted. I have to admit it, it works better under Linux than under Windows because I didn't need to load any drivers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As someone with programming experience for a financial company I can tell you that the reason the charts are generated periodically and not custom generated is costs. If they provided real time finanical updates, it'd cost them a fortune. Providing you with data that's 15 minutes old costs them almost nothing.
Though not too much. I've been looking for some alternatives to an iPod for a while now..
There's a "Tremor" integer-only codec listed on the CODEC project page.
---if these guys didn't steal software and music, prices would be lower and quality would be higher--- You mean like when MS put product activation into Windows XP and then with the savings they were able to lower prices? What's that, XP is the most expensive Windows yet? Even without pirating? Funny how that works. I haven't noticed lower prices on any copy-protected music cds either.
How about an 'almost new' ipod for $182.50.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&catError encountered in IAWebSig.clsSig.Create: Last Procedure: sPrc_Ins_tblSig
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?
This Web site is using dynamic content with Perl. Already we know the site isn't set up for high concurrency. Plus, it's using open source software, so it can't possibly be up to the enterprise standard of robust scalable architectures.
sid=02/12/31/175213&
It also appears that the main content is being loaded from a database by ID number. New flash: Why not a flat file? Hell-ooooo, haven't they ever heard of CSV?
mode=thread&tid=106
And it looks like the programmer decided to respond to a user action on every request. Call me an old relic, but I do miss the days when every programmer didn't have to worry about some stupid "UI" and instead concentrated on what computers were intended for: outputting incessant streams of meaningless data.
If this guy expect this site to hold up to the Awesome Powers of the Slashdot Effect, he'd better think again.
Breakfast served all day!
It's kind of weird to see a flamebait parent post morph into an interesting tech discusssion. I'll probably get modded off-topic, but what the hell.
I'm actually writing a blog system that stores blog files in xml and then transforms them from xml to html (among other formats). I've considered the whole just-in-time transformation thing, but I'm worried that it might be too much of a speed hit (every time a user hits the blog site, yet another transform). If it saps too much server cpu cycles, sysadmins might not be all to keen on having the software installed.
Do you think my fears are unfounded, and that 1000 users hitting the site a day (which means maybe ~1500 jit xslt transformations) on a server that a hell of a lot of people are using for a hell of a lot of other things is reasonable?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
>You know, one with no holes barred.
You mean it includes nostrils and ears?
Man, I learn something new everyday on the internet.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Are we using iPods WITH Linux or are we installing linux on the iPod and then installing the iPod stuff on linux? :)
needs a little clarification
The only thing missing is a nice GUI. ...if that isn't the story of Linux in a nutshell.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- Duality 3.1 - "Scheme" switcher for MacOS X (you say theme, we say scheme, I have no idea why)
- IHeartNY - Custom icons and dock skins.
- CandyBar - from Panic and the IconFactory, allows you to customize any and all system icons, including the toolbar, the trash icon, the default folder icon, etc.
So I'd say we're pretty much covered. I'm sure it won't be long before someone writes an app that will replace Dock.app to do something different, even if Apple tries to sue the bejesus out of them.Hmm, now that I've compiled this list (and I'm sure I missed a bunch of stuff), why haven't I installed any of this on my OS X machine? *off to download
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
If you're seriously expecting a ton of traffic to a web site, DNS round-robin to multiple web caches is an excellent idea. Akamai has a pretty good thing going, where people pay to put their content out on the proxy network that has convenient nodes all over the planet. Even just for a farm of web servers, though, putting a Squid cache in front of them and "pegging" certain URLs in memory makes an amazing speed difference.
Back when I worked for Excite@Home, we got to play with this on our E-Commerce sites. Usually it took ten web servers to handle peak load. We tried out transparent reverse proxy-caching, and were able to reduce that to *two* web servers. We could have easily gotten by with one if we didn't need fault-tolerance. It may seem unnecessarily complex, but IMHO any site that expects to handle massive web traffic should seriously investigate a front-end proxy-cache server. Virtually all of the very high-traffic sites do this (including Slashdot, though done in a slightly different way).
So, complex? Yeah, a little bit. But the performance benefits of using specialized products designed to do one job well (squid proxy cache, plus an apache-based cgi engine behind it) cannot be ignored by anybody expecting her site to get hammered.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
using ephpod and WINE. this uses a GUI. here's a site with step by step instructions.
> Why, I bet it does! Of course, since the iPod can only play mp3 files you're shit out of luck now aren't you? You might as well upload jpegs.
It also accomodates WAV and AIFF files...
There was a time when cd burning and downloading and mp3's didn't exist. CD's cost the same then as they do now.
I have 5 USB 2.0 80 gig drives in the field. I get them for 140 bucks a piece.
1. They offer another back up option. My networks have tapes but they also have this extra redundancy. Connect it to a plane jane windows box running 2000(any old box). And you can have it back up your entire network quickly and easily in the wee small hours. 80 gigs is a lot space and you can restore from it rather quickly, much quicker than a tape. Still keep the tapes but for an 80 gig back up that will run for about 3 years constantlym you can beat the price.
2. I have one that does in my tech back with 4 20 gig partitions, one is mp3's for me to listen to. One is just about every software tool imaginable. The third is ISOs of all the redhats, windows, solaris,office, you name it i got it. And the fourth I use to grab files with that need fixing.
I also carry an interface card with me. Because now I dont carry around all those cds. If I have to dump a lotta data, i just pop in the 2.0 card(if the machine doesnt have it) and I boogie.
USB 2.0 is fast enough for me, will be more widepread than firewire. And I have never had a problem with it.
Now my 'doctor' bad is just a Leatherman, this drive, and the adaptor card, and one cd with the drivers.
Firewire is great technology but Apple forced intels hand when the wanted to charge per installation per motherboad. They reneged but way after the fact. That is why it didnt take off so quick.
I have an ipod, and an ibook. And firewire is fast. But I gotta say when I can dump 10 gigs in hardly anytime. No messing with tapes(I still use em but this is quicker) if it fails I always have the tape.
My other USB 2.0 personal drive gets the same treatment as my clients. I leave the house for the night, it goes with me.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
DNS round-robin to multiple web caches is an excellent idea
/. as an example - of all the sites that I visit daily, this site definitely has the worst uptime by a long shot.
No, it's a cheap idea, but not excellent. A hardware loadbalancer is always the way to go if the funds are available. Round Robin's will blindly direct a user to A) an over burdened server (eg: each server has 5 users but server A's users utilizing much more resources), or B) a downed server.
And I definitely wouldn't use
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
My site doesn't waste time listing products that aren't for sale and may never exist. I waited all year for Nomad to release something besides a press release. I finally stopped waiting...they are too late to the party, and now they've missed the 2002/03 Christmas shopping season.
:)
From the Nomad site: "available soon"...how lame is that?
Besides, I love it when Nomad and Archos L-users whine
That's hardly 5GB for $15 ;)
Despite many efforts to create "worldwide hardware load balancing", every idea that doesn't use DNS round-robin in some form to distribute load across caches that do not share high-speed private networks between them has been a fairly unspectacular failure. Hardware load balancers like the Cisco LocalDirector, BigIP F5 (which also does reverse proxy-caching), and Arrowpoint (same) are very cool, and give you very nice redundancy, but don't scale to a globally distributed architecture at all. In those situations (sorry I wasn't more explicit), a DNS round-robin is the main choice if you're not going to attempt to do some sort of ARIN lookup to redirect people to the correct cache, or have a manual redirect to a more responsive country. Of course, behind each of those DNS round-robin entries, you should have an HLB so that that IP will not go unavailable.
Good uptime is generally a side-effect of competent systems administration, not a direct effect of the architecture underlying it. Poor architecture can be worked around by good systems administration, and likewise good architecture made better the same way. However, the original question was about performance, not uptime. A reverse proxy web-cache in front of your web server is a sound decision for high-performance web serving. The uptime or lack thereof can be caused by other systems administration problems, or perhaps something as simple as having a single point of failure along the path.
That said, I should probably have pointed to CNN, Yahoo, or another heavy-load web site that uses reverse proxy web-caches to improve their site's responsiveness, rather than Slashdot.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Apple uses Toshiba 1.8" hard drives in the iPod. You can see an example here. Toshiba sells a PCCard version of this hard drive for $399 retail. You may be able to find it as cheap as $240. Here is Toshiba's page for hard drives.
As you can see now clearly see, this is much smaller (54mm x 78.5mm x 5mm) and lower power than even laptop 2.5" hard drives. Apple probably pays between $150 and $200 for the 5gb version of these drives.
The only thing that's lame is your excuses. The Nomad Zen and the entire Archos product line have been at our local electronics store for a while. And if you bothered to check PriceGrabber.COM or similar sites, you'd see that, while some companies are sold out due to Xmas, several still have them in stock. Reviews on Amazon.com go back to October 23.
Besides, I love it when Nomad and Archos L-users whine :)
And that's your excuse for putting out inaccurate and outdated information?
Most sites do not need a globally distributed architecture, but if it does both Cisco and F5 have respective products that add the functionality of geographic specific caching or traffic management. Check out the 3-DNS from F5. I'm obviously an F5 fan, but maybe that's just because I live 6 minutes from their corporate office :-). I believe that Cisco has left the LocalDirector to smaller installations, and has moved on to some Content Distribution somethingrather.
I still stand by my assertion that a hardware based load balancer is the way to go. I also disagree about your contention regarding the quality of sysadmins. Although the quality of a sysadmin is definitely a factor, a poor architecture that can't handle the load will fail no matter the quality of the sysadmin(s), and visa versa.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Your post doesn't say anything positive about USB 2.0. All your post talks about it how Intel used its market dominance to ensure that USB 2.0 was on more Wintel computers than FireWire.
That's a benefit of USB 2.0's presense, not the technology. I simply said that with FireWire beating USB 2.0 in every category, there is no point for USB 2.0.
USB has it's place, but in my mind it isn't for high performance devices.
mbbac
one of the things i found out was that audio books from audible.com are only supported on MAC OS, using iTunes. Does anyone know of any present hacks to enable non-iTunes software to copy it to the iPod (linux and windows versions...). Thanks! -FunGuy