iPods are the devil's work. (Updated with a method to vanquish the devil)

[DeathKitten]

Okay, about the time I started going out with my boyfriend (~6 months ago), he gave me an iPod he had that he wasn't using. Nice little 80GB classic. It took me entirely too long to get working with my Kubuntu system, probably a good month. I was literally at the point I was going to throw the frelling thing across the room, I was so mad at it and Apple for the stupidity surrounding this player. Then, when I told the boyfriend that if one last thing I was going to try wouldn't fix it, I was going to give him back the iPod because it was worthless to me. Well, that last thing I tried was disabling the journaling, and that fixed it. For then.

Move forward a few months, I was being lazy, distracted by my new relationship, and frustrated over work crap, so I was a few months behind on updating my system to the latest release. I installed 8.10 in like January and didn't even think about the iPod battle when I did a fresh install. I really really should have known better, for not long after that, I went to create a new playlist on the iPod, and gtkpod wasn't working anymore. It would recognize the ipod, list off the music and playlists on it, but when I'd try to save any changes, it wouldn't write to it. This happened both under normal user permissions and kdesudo permissions. Deciding it wasn't a battle I had time for, I made due with what was already on the iPod and moved on. However, there really is no reason for my iPod to not be able to sync with my computer, so I'm calling for help.

I have tried Googling, I have tried searching the forums, and I've scoured my bookmarks and my Google search history. I can not seem to find half the pages I'd followed instructions on last time when trying to get things working the first time, and it seems in my infinite wisdom, I'd deleted the pages I'd bookmarked when working on the problem originally, as they're nowhere to be found... and I use Foxmarks/Xmarks/whatever they're calling themselves this week, so it's pretty unlikely that the bookmarks disappeared for any reason other than my stupidity of deleting them.

Here's a rundown of what I've got going right now:

• I have gtkpod, libgpod4, and libgpod-dev installed.
• I have journaling disabled on the iPod.
• I have tried killing the settings for gtkpod by renaming .gtkpod to .gtkpod-old, and starting fresh in gtkpod.
• Amarok2 seems like it's not inclined to work with iPods until someone decides to take the SVN version that's been sitting since somewhere in December and implement it into a kubuntu release. And Amarok 1.4 was giving me troubles even when I had gtkpod working correctly before.
• I have kubuntu 9.04 installed from an update via apt-get/command line, my last fresh install was 8.10 at the beginning of the year.

If at all possible, I would really rather avoid attempting to compile anything from source, as I've always had an uphill battle on successfully being able to do that. Not even sure why, just it always seems to blow up in my face even when I seem to have detailed instructions to follow and a full list of dependencies to install first. That said, if there is not another option, I will give it a go.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. Just no suggestions of "replace it with something better" as my funds are kinda dancing dangerously thin at the moment, and at any moment my living situation could go kablooie and I'll be dipping into the red to survive. I could technically go back to a Motorola piece of dren I had before, but the thing only has 5GB of space on it, the interface is problematic at best, and I don't have any way to make it work in the car without having to go out and buy new accessories for it.

[GreyGeek]

Re: iPods are the devil's work.

Just for grins and giggles, turn journaling back on and give the iPod another try. Maybe the devs fixed that journaling issue. Worth a try.

[DeathKitten]

Re: iPods are the devil's work.

Okay, so while googling for the disabling journaling thing, to see if anyone else had success re-enabling, I found some more information that reminded me of something else I had done last time, but not this time, and allowed me to find out about a problem that had developed without me realizing it.

So, in the way this silly little player interfaces with my system, it somehow had managed to get disconnected without correctly being unmounted first. Unlikely for this to be a result of anything I did, as I'm paranoid about ejecting things properly and hate the frelling windows computer at work because it almost literally takes it five gorram minutes to spit out that stupid little eject dialog box. At any rate, the information found on this page: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-943025.html allowed me to see that the iPod indeed had not been unmounted correctly at some point and my system was rebelling for it. dmesg was giving me almost the same last two lines when I looked at it on my system. Towards the bottom of that page, it is suggested that one restart their computer with the mounted iPod attached to resolve this. Done and done, and now iPod is behaving again.

Now, while mucking around with this, I remembered that a friend had talked me through adding a line to my fstab file to keep the iPod from auto mounting for me, and gave it a permanent mount point. A little digging, and I found the IM conversation again, and I set that up once more. I actually like it better this way, as I can tell it to mount with a quick "mount /media/Tomato/" to the terminal window, then launch gtkpod from the same window. Also, with all this resolved, I don't need to launch gtkpod using kdesudo anymore. When I'm done, all I gotta do is "umount /media/Tomato/" and I'm done again. Silly little thing still says it's connectect after that on its screen, but the computer says it's unmounted and I've successfully done it a few time and no harm seems to have come of it. I wasn't as sure about the safely remove option when viewing the iPod from the Computer/Removable storage section of the fancy pants KDE4 K-menu thingie, so I feel better not using it anymore.

If someone else wants to try what I did to my fstab file, in care you're also fussing with your iPod for similar reasons, here's the line I added:

/dev/sdc2 /media/Tomato auto rw,noauto,user 0 0

Now, hopefully with all this posted here to the forums, when I lose my mind, do a fresh install all over again, and find the iPod not working once more, I will fine my thread here and be able to solve my problem without making a fuss for everyone else to see. Also, I hope this helps someone else out.

[barbolani]

Re: iPods are the devil's work. (Updated with a method to vanquish the devil)

My iPod works just fine with Amarok2 on a standard fresh install. The only odd thing I found is that you need to mount it with the graphic applet after plugging it in. Otherwise, Amarok does not realize that it's there.

After that, I just open Amarok and do your business with your iPod as usual. I did not add any extra package, gtkpod or anything else.

[DeathKitten]

Re: iPods are the devil's work. (Updated with a method to vanquish the devil)

The problem with that is, I am mounting the iPod from the command line now, and I leave Amarok open almost all the time because if I am on the computer, I am likely listening to music.

I will keep this in mind if I later decide I'd like to give Amarok another go. That said, does Amarok correctly import album artwork when I load the iPod?

[barbolani]

Re: iPods are the devil's work. (Updated with a method to vanquish the devil)

I see album artwork in Amarok, but it's not because it's in my iPod because I use the iPod for listening to music and never put anything else than mp3 files. So the answer is, I don't know.