iPod Touch and Linux

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Thomas Milne
<tbrucemilne-TcoXwbchSccMMYnvST3LeUB+6BGkLq7r at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Anyone using this device with Linux, in particular with Debian?
>
> I looked at a couple of tutorials but they're aimed at Ubuntu (like
> seemingly everything), so some of the steps have me adding Ubuntu
> sources.
>
> I was looking over the release notes for Gnome 2.30 and its supposed
> to have good support for iPhone/Touch, just wondering how nasty are
> the hoops I have to jump through.

If you want to do terribly much on it, you'll want it jailbroken.

I found the "ifuse" installation to be somewhat flakey/non-fun.  There
*are* packages of reasonably late-breaking versions of the tooling in
Debian/testing, so there's hope of it "all working."

But iTunes has the habit of overriding things, so the following
desirable scenario doesn't work out:

 - Sync some stuff onto iPod from Win/Mac via iTunes
 - Sync more stuff onto iPod from Linux via GnuPod/similar
 - Sync back on Win/Mac iTunes instance, and get the "union of syncs."

Unfortunately, that third step doesn't work :-(.  Sync again, and you
can expect to watch whatever you added from the Linux side disappear,
as iTunes "heals the errors" (and deems anything not done using iTunes
as An Error).

GnuPod isn't unfriendly in that way; it'll happily regenerate its XML
file based on what files (music/video) it finds on the device.

I can't speak for Amarok or the Gnome-related stuff; there *may* be
some friendlier bits.  I'm pretty sure you'll want to look up ifuse,
tho.

And don't have high expectations as to how much interaction you can
have between the free tools and the extremely-not-free iTunes.

-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists