This had been tested with
Debian Etch
Gnome 2.14.3
Amarok 1.4.4. (Using KDE 3.5.5)
For some reason, i don’t like the whole KDE windowmanager stuff, but prefer to use GNOME instead. However, i think that Amarok is the finest media player out there. I used Amarok (and some other KDE apps) already when i was still running XFCE as window manager, so i decided to stick to it on my Debian workstation. As a proud owner of an iPod (thanks to my sister who will never read this 
), i want to sync the iPod with Amarok instead of one of the other apps. GNOME’s own app, „Rythmbox Music player“ syncs the iPod fine, but i had several problems with GTKpod: errors occurred when GTKpod tried to read/write the iPods database -> syncing didn’t work any more.
Install Software
First of all, install Amarok, by running
4life:~# apt-get install amarok
as root. If that worked out fine, plug in your iPod. GNOME detected it automatically on my system, here is some output of my system
4life:~# lsusb
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 05ac:120a Apple, Inc. iPod Nano
and some more:
4life:~# dmesg
usb 4-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 2 choices
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 6
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Vendor: Apple Model: iPod Rev: 1.62
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
SCSI device sde: 7999487 512-byte hdwr sectors (4096 MB)
sde: Write Protect is off
sde: Mode Sense: 68 00 00 08
sde: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sde: 7999487 512-byte hdwr sectors (4096 MB)
sde: Write Protect is off
sde: Mode Sense: 68 00 00 08
sde: assuming drive cache: write through
sde: sde1 sde2
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sde
usb-storage: device scan complete
FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will b e case sensitive!
Don’t care about the UTF warning, i never experienced problems with it. If no errors appeared until now, continue with configuring Amarok:
Configure
Start Amarok, go to
Applications -> Sound & Video -> Amarok
Later the iPod can be found in the Category „Media Device“ (the button down below „Magnatune.com“ ) But first of all, we have to configure Amarok, so that it finds your iPod. Therefore go to
Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Amarok... -> Media Devices
Clicking on the Autodetect Devices shows :
No new media devices were found. If you feel this is an error, ensure that the DBUS and HAL daemons are running and KDE was built with support for them. You can test this by running "dcop kded mediamanager fullList" in a Konsole window.
Running the suggested command as user results only in
user@4life:~$ dcop kded mediamanager fullList
call failed
As root you get more informations
4life:~# dcop kded mediamanager fullList
ERROR: Couldn't attach to DCOP server!
In case you want to use your iPOD under KDE, the DCOP should be up and running and ready to use now. But we have to add it manually, because when using GNOME there is no KDE DCOP server listening in the background. Click on Add Device:
Select the plugin to use with this device:
Choose the Apple iPod Media Device here. Take any name for your Ipod.
Get the Mounting Point of your iPOD, in my case:
4life:~# mount
/dev/sde2 on /media/IPOD type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,quiet,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=077,iocharset=utf8)
Enter that in the last field, click OK. The iPod appears in the Media Devicecategory, if not you have to press Connect.
You are now ready to drag n drop your collection onto the iPod. When finished, don’t forget to press the Disconnect button, otherwise you can’t unmount the iPod. On my system Amarok displays always
Post-disconnect command failed, before removing device, please make sure that it is safe to do so.
but this is irrelevant.
Finetuning
Finally, i don’t want to have Rhythmbox started automatically when i plug in the iPod, so i disabled it here:
Desktop -> Preferences ->Removable Drives and Media
Multimedia -> Portable Music Players
Now uncheck the Play music files when connected. If you want to autostart Amarok, keep it enabled and enter amarok instead of rhythmbox. Doing so also means that your system is putting Amarok in foreground if it is already running when connecting the iPod.
Have fun.
