[COLUG] HINT: Linux and the new iPod Shuffle

[Paul Williams]

On Tue, 2006-12-26 at 09:58 -0500, Joshua Kramer wrote:
> Howdy All,
> 
> I have a hint for anyone who wants to use one of the new iPod Shuffle 
> music players under Linux.  (This is the latest Shuffle, which is barely 
> larger than a small metal clip and fits inside of a matchbox...)
> 
> There are various programs available for getting iPods to work under 
> Linux.  I downloaded and installed one, gtkpod, but at first it wasn't 
> working.  When I tried to sync a playlist to the device, it would just sit 
> there... and sit there... and I couldn't even kill-9 the app.  The only 
> way to get it "un-stuck" was to pull the USB plug.
Which version did you get? I built the latest from source recently, and
it seems to work better than it used to.

Also, many GNOME and KDE music managers have iPod support, such as
Rhythmbox, amaroK, and Listen.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/ http://www.amarok.kde.org and
http://listengnome.free.fr/ respectively.

> Linux sees it as mass storage, so I tried to copy a file to the device. 
> Same thing.  So, I perused my kernel messages, and found a bunch of 
> messages like these:
> 
> SCSI error : <1 0 0 0> return code = 0x10000
> end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 11192
> Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 2798
> lost page write due to I/O error on sdb
> scsi1 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device
> Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 2799
> lost page write due to I/O error on sdb
> 
> The iPod worked fine on my work laptop (which runs XP professional).  Not 
> wanting to go out and buy Winders, I tried a few other things.  There was 
> one thing that did work: using and old dusty USB 1.0 hub between the USB 
> port and the iPod.  It seems that the iPod isn't 100% compliant with the 
> USB 2.0 standard to the point it won't work with Linux; but if you can 
> force USB 1.0 mode on the port, it works fine.
> 
<rant>
Another problem with Apple is that, with the release of iTunes 7, they
no longer offer the latest firmware download as a binary. You used to be
able to flash the new firmware on in Linux, but now that it is
integrated into iTunes 7, and downloads automatically, so you have to
use Windoze.
Also, in iTunes 7, Apple has made DAAP Sharing more secure by adding
"Client-DAAP-Validation" headers into the program's HTTP requests, so
now the reverse engineered DAAP doesn't work.
</rant>


Thanks,
Paul Williams (paul at smoothweb.net) | Jabber: pwill at jabber.org
Support Free Software: FSF | GNU | Ubuntu