iPod Support in iTunes 4.0 Forum

It is also possible to mount the iPod via Firewire. I have this currently setup in Fedora Core 1 using a firewire PCI card. Firewire support in Kernel 2.4.22 is shoddy at times. Hotplug doesn't always work. I believe 2.6.x kernel supports hotplug much better, and I will try later on with that.

Using Firewire versus USB is nearly identical. The difference is getting the kernel to recognize the iPod as a SCSI device on sda and then pointing the device to /mnt/ipod. Once that is done, the rest of the process is identical to the USB instructions that Aric posted.

Word of warning:
Don't use other Non-iTunes iPod software with the iPod - if you have purchased songs from the Apple iTunes music store. Songs that are purchased (.m4p or .m3a files) will not be read correctly and could corrupt the itunesDB file. I learned this the hard way using Ephpod and GTKPod on Linux.

So in closing, making iTunes work on Linux is a must!

Do you have the iPod connecting successfully?

That would be surprising as the work i have done with iPod devices is currently usb specific (iTunes polls the device busses and i have only coded the usb side of that)

If you know of any good linux firewire projects that provide apis to poll the firewire bus i would love to use those to also provide full firewire support also! If i get chance i may just try to scrape files in /proc/bus/firewire but unfortinatly i do not have firewire working on my laptop and do not know much about it.

Aric,

No I have not been able to connect to the iPod. I can't get iTunes to stay open for no more than a few seconds. It keeps crashing. I'm hoping a new build will fix the instability. I'm using the CX 3.1 beta. I may try to revert back to the CX iTunes version.

The only app that comes to mind that uses firewire extensively is Kino. It's a DV editing app for linux.
http://kino.schirmacher.de/

I don't know if these apps have any polling but here they are:
GTKPod.
http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/

Java iPod. This app sucks but there is source.
http://mypod.sourceforge.net/

Joe

Aric,

Ok, I reverted back to the iTunesPreview. This build is stable for iTunes. I tried the iTunes using CXITunesPreview. I used a P4 2ghz desktop with firewire and used Knoppix 3.6 Live CD and loaded 2.6.7 Kernel. The iPod works great as a mounted hard drive. I added to the dosdevices as G: pointing to /mnt/sda2. I launched iTunes, it was SLOW. It seemed to detect the iPod, but it gave an error about being unable to access the iPod correctly and said to reinstall the iTunes software to fix this. No go. :(

This might be related to the polling you were referring to Aric.

Joe

have you verified that you have installed dcom95 and applied ipodfix.reg? (last few steps of the faq)

The Ipod stuff is not in the Preview (unfortinatly) but we should get a beta2 our soon. We have been really stumped on a quicken bug that has been delaying beta2 for over a week now.

Yeah I tried that. But iTunes likes to crash after a minute for no apparent reason. It crashes in Fedora Core 1 and Knoppix 3.6. I got a USB iPod cable so I want to try that out as soon as the next build is available and stable enough in iTunes for testing.

I also tried installing Beta 2 with Fedora Core 3. It locks up while launching the setup program. I suppose it hasn't been tested there yet.

Joe