iPod and Linux

All I have to say is – that was way too difficult. I got an iPod as a birthday gift (Thanks!) and of course wanted to use it in Linux. Easy, right? Nope! When I plugged the iPod into my home machine it recognized the iPod straight-away, but would not access it. Same thing on my laptop (both those machines are FC2). I didn't even bother trying on my work machine as it's a super old version of debian that doesn't have working USB or firewire (the price you pay for > 600 days of uptime I guess). After a while of searching I found the answer. You'll never guess where. That's right – LQ – in this post. The problem is that the iPod reports that it has a few more sectors than it actually does. Along with that, if it gets a request for an invalid sector, it will stop responding to requests until it's disconnected and reconnected. This usually wouldn't be a problem, but the Fedora kernel has support for a new partition type: EFI. When you connect the iPod, Linux probes it for partition type. While most partition tables exist at the beginning of the disk, EFI happens to exist at the end. BUT, the end is in the aforementioned illegal non-existent space, so every time you plug the iPod in it stops responding. If you are having this problem, simply unset CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION and recompile the kernel. I'll provide a binary if people are interested. Was quite a pain, but I'm happy to report that as I type this I am listening to songs I put on the iPod in Linux, using GTKpod. Sadly, this isn't the first time the Fedora kernel has bit me, and am considering giving Suse 9.2 a shot when it comes out.
–jeremy