[ale] 2nd generation iPod shuffle with Linux?

[John Wells]

Hi guys. 

Transition from OS X is complete...everything works great. Mac-on-Linux is great too...want to type up my experience there soon...but suffice it to say that they mean it when they say near-native performance...you can hardly tell there's a vm underneath it. 

So, now I have a problem. I received one of those iPod shuffles (2nd generation...looks like small belt clip) for Christmas. It's useful for listening to podcasts while running. 

However, Linux won't see it. Well, it sees it, but it won't see it as a valid disk. I get an unable to read partition table error when trying to look at it with fdisk.

I've read that this may be caused by lack of hfs+ support, but I would still expect it to have a valid partition. Regardless, tried installing hfsutils but still no love.

Many folks have resolved their issues by starting iTunes in Windows and plugging in the shuffle (at least with older shuffles), which supposedly reformats the shuffle as FAT. However, I have no Windows anymore, except in Vmware, and both VMWare and Mac-On-Linux have had problems recognizing the shuffle so far. 

I would reformat to FAT with something like gparted, but I'd lose the firmware. I've seen folks do this with 1rst generation shuffles with dd used to dump the firmware first, but not with 2nd generations. I'm not confident it'll work, nor am I confident that, if it doesn't, I won't have to return the darned device to Apple to get the firmware back.

Anyone else gone through this pain yet?

Thanks,
John