Missing Link

Earlier today I was trying to think of something to occupy my time.  I remembered that I had wanted to try out using my iPod in Ubuntu and thought I’d give it a shot.      I knew Amarok, the music software I use in Ubuntu, supported the iPod so I figured it would be a rather quick and painless experience.     It ALMOST was,   with one small little snag.  When I hooked the iPod into my Ubuntu machine it was detected and automatically mounted.     Amarok even recognized it and asked me what I wanted to do with it.    I told it to treat it as an iPod and all was well,   except for a small little error message:

media device: failed to create a lockfile on device /media/bazzle

Yes, I named my iPod  “bazzle”.    Regardless, I had a conundrum.  While I could READ the files on the iPod, I could not yet write to it, which was a major part of what I was trying to accomplish.   After a few quick searches I finally figured out what the issue was:  The filesystem on the iPod.    Since I’ve used my iPods only with Macs they were both formatted with the HFS+ filesystem.   By default journaling is enabled on the HFS+ filesystem – unfortunately the Linux HFS+ driver can’t write to journaled volumes.    The solution is pretty easy, actually:  Turn off journaling.     This can be accomplished by hooking the iPod back up to a mac and issuing a single command via the terminal:

diskutil disableJournal /dev/<diskidentifier>

In this command, <diskidentifier> is the identifier assigned to the ipod.  You can determine what yours is by issuing the command “diskutil list” on your mac with your ipod plugged in.    Mine was disk2s3, making the full command for me “diskutil disableJournal /dev/disk2s3″.

Note that for this to work, your ipod has to be mounted.  I had a bit of trouble getting this to happen until I enabled disk mode via iTunes.   To do this just select your ipod from the sidebar in iTunes and on that initial page that has info on your iPod select the “enable disk mode” option.    The iPod will then be mounted as a disk.

Once I issued that command it told me journaling was disabled,   I ejected it from my mac and took it back over to my linux machine and plugged it in.    It worked without any problems and I am now able to move music and playlists onto the iPod as easily as I could on my mac.

This is an issue likely to crop up for anyone who has a mac formatted iPod,   but is also incredibly easy to resolve.   Using an iPod in Linux without iTunes is not only possible, it’s downright simple.

[tags] Apple, iPod, Ubuntu, Amarok,  iPod in Ubuntu,  HFS+ Journaling [/tags]