Linux does ipod (sort of)

Message ID: 358386

Posted By: deepdistrust

Subject: Linux does ipod (sort of)

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~geha/ipod/

This is the Linux Ipod how-to document. It was written in '02, but Ipod was a new toy then. Even if you had Red Hat 8, it was still a multi-step process dragging you down to a terminal, but put that aside for the moment. Notice that it only mentions Red Hat. What if you are running one of the other distributions? Tough.

This is the flip side of choice. Nobody can write an install script or a help document. This is one of the reasons you hardly see any third party applications for Linux home users. There is no one defined environment.

The how-to also illustrates how things get done on the Linux side when dealing with new stuff. One of the brave souls will go through the pain, and figure out how to get it working with Linux, and writes a long how-to. From that point on, the Linux nuts start claiming that "xyz works on Linux", when they actually mean to say "xyz sorta kinda works on Linux, if you spend a lot of time and jump through a lot of hoops setting it up." It will be a couple of years before the new thing becomes easy enough for the novice use.

BTW, notice that not all firewire cards worked with Linux then. (Who knows, they probably still don't!) Also notice that the author of this document ditched Linux and went to OS X since he wrote this document. Can you blame him?

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