[PLUG] iPod with Linux?

John Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sun Jul 3 22:20:46 UTC 2005


On 3 Jul 2005, at 12:39, Eric Wilhelm wrote:

> # The following was supposedly scribed by
> # John Jordan
> # on Sunday 03 July 2005 09:57 am:
> 
> >So then I went back to gtkpod and tried again. Still no success. Same
> >error messages.
> 
> Can root write to it?   (try touch-ing a file (man touch))

I tried man touch, but it just reinforced my low opinion of man 
pages. I did get an idea of what touch can do, but I could only read 
the first 22 pages of 65. That's because that's as far as it would 
scroll. At the bottom it said "22/65" End", highlighted. I tried every 
key combination I could think of to make it go further, but since it 
didn't give me the secret code, I just gave up and closed the 
terminal window. I guess when they wrote the man pages they 
assumed we were all born knowing what the key combination to 
scroll further is. :(

> Did you show us the permissions?  ( ls -ld /media/iPod/ )  That would
> help.

I did, but here it is again:

drwxr-xr-x   1  jjj jjj  10  2005-02-13 22:30  /media/iPod/

> Also see Jeme's note about "user".  Is it in /etc/fstab ?  Maybe you
> should just put it there.

This I may have actually understood part of. :)

Opening fstab in gedit it says:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
[pretend the items below are tabbed -- I can't make it work in e-mail]
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults, errors=remount -ro 0
/dev/hda1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0
/dev/sda /media/usb0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

I don't know what the proc line is all about, but I do know hda1 and 
hda2, because I created them when I installed Ubuntu. And 
/dev/hdc is pretty obvious. And I think I just learned something -- 
the "ro" and "rw" mean "read-only" and "read-write," correct? And 
in hda2 where it says "-ro" that means "not read-only"? And "user" 
means any user has full access?

It took me a moment, but I also figured out /dev/sda/media/usb0. 
At one time I had my external USB hard disk connected directly to 
this Linux laptop. At the time it was still FAT32, which is how 
Seagate shipped it. It is now NTFS and hanging on the Windows 
2000 computer, where it is going to stay. I created a share on the 
Windows 2000 computer and the Linux laptop reads and writes to 
it now through the share. Evidently once an entry is made in fstab 
it stays there, even if the drive goes away. But I think that line 
could be deleted, since I have no intention of putting it back on the 
laptop.

Reading about iPods and Linux, it appears Apple creates three 
partitions. Sda1 is just a few bytes long. Sda2 is a bit larger and is 
some kind of filesystem map. And sda3 is where all the rest of the 
stuff hangs. 

So (guessing ahead here), if I were to add a line that says 
something like:

/dev/sda3 /media/iPod auto? rw,usr,noauto? 0 0

I might solve the problem? (Except some of what I put in that line 
may be wrong [note question marks], or missing.) I'm scared to 
mess with it, lest I end up with a computer that can't find its 
filesystem.

> What is your automounter?  (dpkg -l '*mount*' maybe tells you (also
> "ls /etc/init.d" might provide some insight since it presumably starts
> at boot.))

dpkg -l "mount" gave me:

Desired=unknown/Install/Remove//Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config//Half-
installed [Hey, how did this thing know the condition of my brain?]
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=Both-problems (Status,Err: 
(uppercase=bad)
||/    Name         Version           Description
+++ =======   =========      =========================
ii     mount       2.12p-2ubuntu2 Tools for mounting and 
manipulating filesystem

Ls /etc/init.d gave a listing of lots of scripts. I noted five that might 
be of interest:

mountall.sh
mountnfs.sh
mountvirtfs.sh
umountfs.sh
umountnfs.sh

But I don't know if any of them is an "automounter."

Did you see my other note about trying hpmount? It appears to me 
that it worked and the iPod should now be read/write. However, 
while I have always been able to copy things off of it, I still can't 
write to it.



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