nullis.net

Seems I currently have a fasination for things starting with little i's (iiNet, ideas, now iPod). That's right, now an iPod.

It's not my first iPod, my first was a [HTML_REMOVED]30G iPod Photo[HTML_REMOVED]. It was great, I could listen to music, play games and read text (tho I never did read text ... ). But the problem was, it was too big and bulky, and in the end, it was annoying with other things in my pocket. Oh, and the screen was easy scratched, so it was a pain to read it at times, but you didn't have to most of the time. So for the last while, it had been delegated to just sitting around collecting dust (maybe ill play around with iPodLinux on it, one day).

The other day, however, i went and got my mum a [HTML_REMOVED]2nd generation iPod Shuffle[HTML_REMOVED] for a birthday present. Was at home, setting it up with her favourite music, and decided I would order myself one. So I did, and it arrived today.

Now, when I was setting the first one up, i just plugged it in, and Linux detected it, and i could mount it. Seemed to have no partitions, so just mounted the device, and it worked fine. GTKPod had no problems setting it up and copying songs, and it seems to be working OK. When I got mine today, I decided to set it up via Windows (in a VMWare session), and see if it created a seperate partition (my original iPod did..). However, the installer did not create another partition, and the device still is just /dev/sdb in this case.

While this must be the way it works, it does make me wonder if we need at all to even do the Windows step, and just do what I did with the first under Linux. If anyone who has had a 2nd Gen. iPod Shuffle under Linux can comment on how they have their one set up, that would be great.

Since buying my iPod Photo months ago, I have never updated the songs on it, because I haven't been able to find a decent tool for Linux that works well (atleast for me).

I had tried GTKpod previously, but had found that it overall, it didn't work as well as it should, or maybe it was me not understanding its functionality right.

Anyway, skip forward to the a few days ago, and I was finally getting sick listening to the same songs (and podcasts), over and over again. It was time to change the songs on the iPod. I gathered this meant one of two things; installing gtkpod and trying to get it to work, or borrowing a friends computer with windows on it, to copy on some songs.

Deciding against the later, I was going to install gtkpod again, when i realised that gnupod was there. Tho it is text based, i decided to try it out.

After some minor difficulties with the scripts, mainly relating to case sensitive nature (see the end for more info), due to the default ubuntu flags when it mounted, i finally got the scripts working, and I must say, I am impressed. The advantage is they are perl scripts, so they are changable to customise a bit how I want them.

So this weekend, I might actually put some new songs on my iPod, and be able to listen to fresh G'Day World podcasts on the train each morning.

Note: The problem was because of the default Ubuntu settings for mounts. I didn't have my iPod set up in fstab, so whenever it plugged it, it got these default settings. To fix, it was as simple as adding the "check=r" flag to the mount options, either in fstab, or mounting it manually. See this email thread for more information.

Also, Ubuntu also by default adds the flag "iocharset=utf8", when mounting. It seems that this flag, overrides the check flag. So for now, I have simply removed it. If anyone has a solution to this, would be great, thanks.