Just to try to reduce any potential legal danger, I’ll start by pointing out that “iPod” is a trademark of Apple.

Mounting the iPod

In order for programs to interact with the iPod it needs to be mounted, just like a USB flash drive or external hard drive. I use Openbox instead of a more elaborate desktop environment, so I had to set this up manually. GNOME or KDE may auto detect the iPod when you plug it in, eliminating the need for this step.

First, create a directory which you would like the iPod to be mounted on. I created the directory “/mnt/ipod”. Make sure this directory is owned by your user and group, using chown and chgrp if necessary. Then add this line to the end of the /etc/fstab file using your favorite text editor:

UUID=D1A7-AB47 /mnt/ipod auto rw,noauto,user 0 0

I won’t go into all the details, there is a lot of information on editing fstab floating around. The things that will change for you here are the directory given as the second item on the line, and the UUID. The directory is where you want the iPod to be mounted; use the directory you created earlier. The UUID is the ID of the iPod filesystem, and can be found, after plugging in the iPod, by issuing the command at the terminal

ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/

That should output a bunch of random looking hexadecimal strings, one for each storage device attached to your computer. The iPod’s string will be much shorter (or at least that was true in my case), making it simpler to find the correct one. One catch was that this command listed two of these short ID strings for my iPod. Only one will work, so just pick one and continue; if the next step doesn’t work simply re-edit fstab by inserting the other UUID and it should then be fine.

Now that you have the information in /etc/fstab, you should be able to run the command

mount path-to-ipod-directory

and the iPod will be mounted and ready for use. If that command doesn’t display any output, the mount was successful and you should be able to go to that directory and look at the iPod file structure. If there was an error, double check that the directory is owned by your user and that the fstab entry is correct. As noted before, if you chose the wrong UUID among the various choices you will need to go back and try a different one.

When finished with the iPod, unmount by using the command

umount path-to-ipod-directory

Installing Necessary Programs

The programs I use are Banshee for managing and playing my music library, Soundconverter for converting audio files between formats, and GtkPod for transferring music to and from the iPod. If you already have a preferred audio player and/or conversion utility, obviously you can use them instead of Banshee or Soundconverter. In addition, you’ll need to install some libraries that enable these programs to handle .mp3 and .m4a files, two formats commonly used with an iPod. Most of these are available through the package manager, but there are two catches. The first is that you have to add an additional repository for apt to look in, the Debian multimedia repository. The second catch we’ll get to later.

To add the additional repository, edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line at the end:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free

To keep apt from complaining, you’ll need to install the public key for this new repository, available here. Then, in a terminal, navigate to the directory you downloaded that to and run the following command as root:

dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring_2010.12.26_all.deb

Now you’ll actually be able to start installing stuff!

You’ll need the following packages:
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg (I’m not sure what this provides, but stuff definitely breaks without it)

gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (Banshee plays both mp3 and m4a without this, but for some reason the track progress bar breaks without it when playing mp3 files so I guess it’s good to have)

gstreamer0.10-lame (Used by Soundconverter to create mp3 files)

gstreamer0.10-alsa (Needed by Banshee. I’m assuming you’re just using ALSA, if you have Pulseaudio or JACK or some such you may need additional packages. If you don’t know, just go with what’s listed here and if it isn’t working start looking for packages that look something like ‘gstreamer-pulseaudio’ or ‘gstreamer-jack’ and see what happens)

soundconverter (The actual Soundconverter package)

banshee (The actual Banshee package)

Now the second catch rears its ugly head. The version of GtkPod in the Debian repositories lacks the capability to handle m4a files, presumably because of patent/licensing issues. mp3 works fine, so if that’s all you need to use just install the gtkpod package using apt. Otherwise, if you have a large amount of Apple Lossless files lying around like I do, in order to move them to the iPod using GtkPod you’ll need to grab the GtkPod source code from their website and compile it yourself. Don’t panic! I’ll walk you through this.

You will need to install the following additional packages to compile gtkpod:

libgpod-dev
libid3tag0-dev
libglade2-dev
libxml-parser-perl
flex
libmp4v2-dev
intltool

Then, download the source from here. It is a tar.gz archive, so you will need to extract it. This can be done using

tar xzvf gtkpod-0.99.16.tar.gz

at the terminal. After running that command there will be a new directory, gtkpod-0.99.16. Enter this directory and run the commands


./configure
make
******** Become root using su or sudo ********
make install


GtkPod is now installed!

Using GtkPod

Using GtkPod to manage your iPod is fairly intuitive. Once you start the program (run the command “\usr\local\bin\gtkpod” from the terminal), you need to tell it about your iPod. Select Edit and go to Repository/iPod options. A window will pop up. Select “Add new Repository/iPod”. There will be some information to fill in, but the defaults are fine except for the iPod mountpoint, which you should set to the the directory you chose to mount your iPod at in the earlier section. By the way, your iPod should be mounted at this point! You will also need to fill in your iPod model; GtkPod provides a menu for this. Mine is a Classic -> 160 GB -> Silver (xC293), you should put whatever is appropriate. Hit apply. An entry for your iPod should have appeared in the left side of the GUI. Click on the “Load iPod(s)” button, and the current contents of the iPod will appear. Now you can add files from your computer to the iPod, or delete songs! When you are done, press the “Save” icon, and eject the iPod by right-clicking the entry in the Playlists area and selecting the “Eject” option.

Hopefully, you now have everything set up to manage the songs on your iPod from Linux! For further information, check out the websites of the various programs for documentation. Also, you can comment here if anything needs clarifying or the instructions lead to disaster. I will do my best to answer!