At work, I listen to my iPod with Rhythmbox on Xubuntu latest stable. Rhythmbox isn’t perfect, but from my experience it was the best at dealing with my iPod, works great for reading from and writing to it. Every once in awhile it will do something that makes me very angry at it.
For example, sometimes when I click on a music share with a password, there is no way to escape the resulting screen. No matter how hard I try, I end up having to go to a virtual terminal and killing the rhythmbox process. I have no need for music shares, or this might be an issue.
Another example, about 90% of the time that I eject my iPod, I have to click OK to a dialog that says “Cannot unmount the volume ‘IPOD’”, with details “Cannot remove directory”. /media/IPOD is owned by my user with perms 0755, so that doesn’t really make any sense. After clicking OK, the media is actually ejected. *shrug* not a big deal.
The most annoying example — and something that makes me not want to use this player again — was yesterday. Rhythmbox was playing The Mighty Mighty Bosstones – The Impression That I Get from my iPod when the player froze. It locked up. I switched to a terminal and killed it, which led to a defunct process, but the window was still open and still very much locked up. Because I hadn’t written anything to the iPod recently, I decided to ignore the flashing red circle and disconnect it anyway. I eventually had to close the window manager and reboot because Rhythmbox was giving me such a hard time. I left work yesterday and thought nothing of it.
This morning I came in, connected my iPod as usual, and came to find there wass no music on there. All of the photos were in tact, so it wasn’t a complete wipe, but every single song (of my ~15GB collection) was gone; and of course not backed up. I knew this day would come someday… just didn’t really want it to be today =\
