MEPIS Community Forum

Well, I got another "Apple" gift...an iPod Touch 4G...a while back I was given an iPod Shuffle...it seems to work fine as an mp3 player...I just plug it into the USB port download my songs, run small Python script to update the database and I'm ready to go. Well, that doesn't seem to work with the Touch 4G. Mepis doesn't recognize it when I plug it into the USB port. After searching, I have loaded gtkPod and ifuse with no luck. I really just want to use it as a music player...don't want to connect to the Internet. Has anybody been able to use the iPod Touch 4G with Mepis 11?

janthree

The last I heard there aren't any linux distros that work with 4G ipods. My daughter has one and I haven't been able to connect it here on my Mepis 11 or on her PClinuxOS computer. If you google around they all say the same thing "it's Apple's fault...or...you should have bought another brand but those suggestions don't really resolve the problem.

Would "jail breaking" it help?

Thanks for the response brux and Caesar2...since this was a gift from an Apple-crazed friend, I had no choice in the matter. Jailbreaking doesn't help...I can't get Mepis to even recognize that it is plugged in...even when I try to force a mount there is nothing there. I have had to venture back into the strange and scary Windows world to access it. You would think that since Apple uses BSD that they would show some appreciation for the Linux community...Apple has made a lot of money from the efforts of previous open source developers. Anyway, I figure in a while, there will be an open source solution to accessing the 4G.

janthree

i tied with my ipod tough 3rd gen with wifi.
fortunately it was fairly new when i tried it. i ended up having to do a full restore after i mucked about with it in linux.
since then i used it with its native software on the other o.s. which i rarely boot.

its just a whole lot easier.

one of those few reasons to keep a windows box around.

The imobiledevice library is supposed to now support Apple 4G devices with the exception of syncing.
I built the latest version along with the latest version of usbmuxd which handles the udev recognition of Ipods
They'll be in the testing M11 CR this evening. If you want to grab them sooner:
32bit http://teharris.net/misc/libimobile32.tar.gz
64bit http://teharris.net/misc/libimobile64.tar.gz

Install all the debs in the appropriate package and theoretically MEPIS will recognize your Ipod.
The theoretically is because I don't have such a beastie to test this with.

Thanks timkb4cq...I really appreciate your efforts...the documentation indicates that imobiledevice works with gtkpod, but I was unable to get the current version in the repos (ver. 0.99) to work, so I have put in a package request for the latest gtkpod version 2.1.0. I tried compiling it myself but wound up hosing my system.

janthree

I don't know if this helps but...I'm running the latest Kubuntu on another hd which has gtkpod 2.1.0 with all the necessary libs and it won't mount my daughters ipod touch (just sees it as a camera).

Sigh...thanks brux...guess I will have to wait a while until a Linux solution catches up...

janthree

I wonder if a newer ifuse package would help....