Recommendation -- iPod?

[Hal Burgiss]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 09:01:51AM +0000, Mark C. Miller wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu 9.04.  My concern is whether, or how well, the two 
> functions of charging the device and managing the music work on Ubuntu.  
> It seems charging should be no problem -- a USB port is a USB port -- but 

Not 100% true. The electrical output can vary. Not sure what an ipod requires
but I use a program to increase the electrical output of usb for my
blackberry. I guess it would charge without it, but would take much, much
longer. 

> transferring songs from the hard to disk to the iPod, building and 
> managing playlists are important.

gtkpod is part of Ubuntu and works fine for moving songs around and doing
playlists. It does seem to have a problem with Album art that it seems to
trash. At least in my case.

The biggest problem with ipods on Linux is interfacing with iTunes. For
some reason Apple has chosen to really complicate that. But I would suggest
Amazon anyway since its a tad cheaper and the music is DRM-less.

Also, if your ipod is formatted with HPFS (apple), then you will have to turn
off journalling in the filesystem in order to write to it. FAT32 works fine
though.

-- 
Hal