My very generous former employers gave me a cute little iPod Nano as a going-away gift. I had been avoiding iPods because they need special software (iTunes) and I was afraid they wouldn’t work well with Linux. A few years ago, I bought an iRiver IHP120, thinking it would be easier for a geek like me to use. It turns out that it wasn’t: there’s some weirdness w/ the harddrive makes it lock up every so often for a minute or so while you’re trying to copy your music. Also, that 20GB hard drive is almost too huge: trying to keep all my shit organized on that thing was like staring at a sink full of dirty dishes every day.

Anyway… I booted up the computer, plugged in the iPod, and… beauty! The system picked up on it right away, and you can even browse your music collection and add to it right from the file browser, something which I don’t think you can do even on a Mac!

As for Amarok, iTune’s feature-heavy and strangely-accented European cousin, the iPod integration works very well. The user interface is a little confusing and takes a while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very easy to add music to your player. There’s even a sweet plugin you can download that will automatically convert your OGG files to MP3 as they’re uploading. Music in other languages (with weirdly accented letters) comes through perfectly on the iPod, something that was a constant source of frustration with my iRiver.

In short: I’m hooked! I finally understand why people love the iPod so much, and after four years of struggling to get Linux to do some of the things that other people take for granted, I’m delighted to find so much thought and effort put into this. (Also, I’m in love with SuSE’s new mounting properties tab.)