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  • From: Stephen Clement <s.clement AT sympatico.ca>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] iPod and BasicLinux
  • Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:24:03 -0500

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




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