Baslinux mailing list

[Stephen Clement <s.clement AT sympatico.ca>]

Hey All,

I've got DeLi Linux on my laptop and I've figured out how to use my iPod 
with it. Since it uses a 2.2.26 kernel, etc. it should be fairly easy to 
do with BasicLinux, so I thought I might explain how I did it:

FYI, I had problems doing this before I had "prepared" my iPod with 
iTunes on WinXP.

First of all, you *need* kernel 2.2.26. Grab it and all the usb-related 
stuff, specically usb-storage is important.

Once you're ready, I suggest you grab modprobe. However, you'll need 
usbcore, usb-uhci (or whichever) and usb-storage loaded at the end. Once 
you insmod usb-uhci (or equivilent), you'll get the "Do not disconnect" 
screen on your iPod. You can mount your iPod like so:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda2 /mnt/ipod

The iPod always gets the first available SCSI device which in most cases 
is sda. Partition 1 has the iPodOS and such, don't play with it. Anyhow, 
take a look around! Quite interesting. If you'd like to do anything 
useful with song adding and such, grab gnupod which is a bunch of perl 
scripts that manipulate your iPod's song library. Command-line, pure 
perl. Requires perl 5.8, I compiled from source. Haven't really tested 
it out all that much (I mostly use gtkpod on my "new" linux distro. Not 
to be confused with gnupod of course). You can also transfer regular 
files around on your iPod. Works quite nicely. When you're ready to 
remove your iPod, make sure you've syncronized your iTunesDB, umount it 
and then (important!) eject it. So:

umount /mnt/ipod
eject /dev/sda

The "Do not disconnect" screen will go away and you can use your iPod 
again. Feel free to pull out the modules you insmodded early on now. 
Anyhow, you're done! Power up the iPod, make sure that any modifications 
you made were actually made. If not, you forgot to syncronize your 
iTunesDB (see gnupod docs for more info).

Anyhow, I hope this guide will help somebody out. Although I realize 
that most of the BasicLinux-using population isn't likely to be running 
BasicLinux on machines with USB or even moreso have an iPod, this might 
be a cool project for those of us who do have it.

Thanks,
Stephen Clement