Amarok, iPods, and the Rest of the Circus

Right on schedule, there’s an empty iPod box sitting in my trash. The AAFES I shopped at was out of the 4GB Nanos, so for a mere $50 extra, it doubles up to 8GB. It looks like silver is the only color people don’t want, so that’s what I got too. It has a lot of nice features: syncing calendars with any iCal-formatted calendar, same with vCard-formatted contacts (all easily possible out of Kontact, Sunbird, and (I think) Thunderbird). Support for album art, just about any *.mp4/*.m4v video, podcasts (Diggnation, anyone?), photos (plus album art), the usual music, and games (official only, short of using iPodLinux or RockBox). Pretty good package, for being about a quarter of the weight/thickness of my Zen.

Now, under Linux, it just gets a little difficult. Users have two main choices: Amarok or Gtkpod. I use Amarok, since it came with KDE. It supports podcasts and a load of players (Creative products, Samsung, Apple, and Zunes, I think), including (gasp) iPods. But the Ubuntu repository has version 1.4.6; fine for what it was used for: listening to music and Diggnation episodes. But G3 iPod (3rd-generation, all you laymen out there) support was added… in 1.4.8. And libgpod was also outdated in the repos, so all that was left was to compile it all on my own. It wasn’t that hard, and most of the prerequisites were already met from my programming, and those that weren’t were in the repos/solved by a quick Google. It shouldn’t require more than 1 gig of space (less than your average Windows game), and then just the usual commands are needed:
./configure
make
sudo make install
And now, with no work, it works (no pun intended). Plug in the Nano, and up comes Amarok with it pre-connected. It gives options to sync/add album art, podcasts, etc., many of the same features as Amarok.

I have yet to get the pictures to work, since GPixpod refuses to recognize it; it’s a bit too new, I think. As for videos, I’ve read that Gtkpod can handle it, so that should work fine.