I have a first generation iPod Nano. Approximately 2 weeks after the warranty expired and literally hours before I boarded a plane to Europe the device stopped working. I looked all over the net for an explanation but at the end I was left with no choice but to send it in for repairs.
My son asked if he could plug it in on his Ubuntu machine the other day. “Sure,” I replied. He couldn’t damage a broken player, right? Well it turns out Ubuntu recognized the device, cleaned up the iPod DB, and now I have a working player again!
Frankly I’m amazed, I thought the flash drive had gone south or something. But nope, apparently it was something in the software between Windows and the iPod (I also tried on a Mac, no luck there either). This is a real success story. With a free OS I got a $249 player.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:53 am
So, sound is working now? And a corrupt database on your Nano got repaired, too?
Wow. It has taken a bit of work from what I have seen, but I hope the experience has been worth it for you.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:19 am
It’s fun. I am still struggling with some things, e.g. running Amarok as a user means I cannot delete files from my remote SMB share. I need to run Amarok via sudo to be able to do this. Of course running Amarok from sudo means a different user so a different collection of music.
But so far I have not been stymied. The Ubuntu forum has saved the day a few times now, e.g. the sound issue was a very weird line in a config file.
The Nano was simply something my son did. I had no idea that could work out. Next time someone says “is it easy enough for my mother” you can reply back “maybe, but a 9 year old can make broken iPods work:-)”
Our current project is converting a .NET application to Mono.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
> I cannot delete files from my remote SMB share
That completely depends on the mount options you give. I haven’t played with mount very much, but you can specify read/write permissions, which will allow you to delete the remote files.