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Sync your iPod Shuffle with Linux

Ryan — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 18:36:53 +0000

The iPod shuffle is a great little device but unfortunately it is buit to work with iTunes and comes with an almost undecipherable file system and database. Apple’s motives are clear here, buy a Mac and use iTunes. Fortunately for us you can save your money as there are a variety of ways to sync your Shuffle using some common Linux utilities.

Now it’s not all rosy, for some reason the iPod Shuffle support on Linux is shaky compared to other iPod models. This guide will walk you though all these problems and get your iPod Shuffle playing nice with your Linux system. This guide will focus on Ubuntu but these instructions will work with any Linux distribution out there.

Step 1: Initial Setup

If you have a new iPod Shuffle you can start here. If you are having problems skip down to the troubleshooting section.

Install gtkpod

Normally you have to connect your Shuffle to iTunes to setup the initial directory structure. gtkpod will handle this instead which allows your shuffle to locate and play music.

Install gtkpod:
$ sudo apt-get install gtkpod

Setup iTunes Directory Structure

Now connect your Shuffle to your computer and it should automatically mount to /media/IPOD or something similar. Start gtkpod.

Click on the New iPod icon and it should ask to create the iPod directory structure. Follow the instructions and choose your iPod model (Shuffle 2nd gen/3rd gen, etc.).

Step 2: Adding Music

Now that the Shuffle has the initial directory structure you can add music. You can use a variety of applications to do this.

If you use gtkpod or Rhythmbox they will work with the iTunes directory format and update the music database automatically. If you want to use Banshee or you want to add music using a file manager like Nautilus or Thunar you will have to download the shuffle_db program to update the database for you.

Optional: Download shuffle_db

This is a little Python program allows you to use the player almost like any other USB flash MP3 player. You simply copy MP3 files onto it using any file manager or application such as Banshee or Rhythmbox then simply run the rebuild_db program to build the music database.

Download shuffle_db:
http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/

Once you have downloaded the shuffle_db program rebuild_db.py, copy it to the root directory on the iPod Shuffle. Now you can add music to the root directory of the Shuffle and when you are done run the rebuild_db.py script to update the music database.

Execute the script. Your iPod my be mounted at a different location.
$ /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

Step 3: Unmount Shuffle and Enjoy

That should be it. Safely unmount your Shuffle and you should be able to listen to music right away.

Troubleshooting

The Shuffle is visible to Rhythmbox or gtkpod but no songs are listed

The permissions on the Shuffle are incorrect or the database is corrupted. This can happen if you have gone a long time since you last added music to your iPod Shuffle and there have been significant changes to your system (updated distribution, or updated gtkpod/Rhythmbox).

You can proceed in one of two ways.

1) Download shuffle_db program and execute it to rebuild your music database.

2) Remove all songs from the device and start at Step 1 above.

Clear the device. Be very careful here.
$ sudo rm -rf /media/IPOD/*

rebuild_db.py won’t execute

The iPod file system or the rebuild_db.py lacks the execute permissions.

Make sure it have execute permissions.
$ chmod +x /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

Try executing the program as root (be careful here).
$ sudo /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

If that doesn’t work you with have to manually mount the iPod Shuffle and execute the script.

Note: The following locations may differ on your system. Make sure that they are correct before executing any code.

Unmount the Shuffle.
$ sudo umount /media/IPOD

Create the new mount directory.
$ mkdir /media/my_ipod

Mount the iPod with a less restrictive umask. This will allow you to execute the script.
$ sudo mount /dev/sdb /media/my_ipod -o umask=0000

You should now be able to execute the script as root.
$ sudo /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

IPod wont play music, green amber flashing lights

The database is corrupted. You need to open Rhythmbox or gtkpod again, or rerun rebuild_db.py depending on how you added music in the first place.

Mount a VirtualBox shared folder inside a guest VM

Ryan — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:42:23 +0000

VirtualBox makes it easy to share folders between the host OS and various guest virtual machines, but it can be difficult to remember the exact way to go about mounting the shared folder within a guest VM. Here is the way to do it correctly.

First off make sure you have installed VirtualBox guest additions.

Switch to root or use sudo.
$ su -

Create the directory and mount the shared folder to the mount point of your choice. Use the shared name you assigned to it when you originally created the shared folder, in this case it is “virtualbox_share”.
# mkdir /media/share # mount virtualbox_share -t vboxsf /media/share

You can have this automatically mounted by adding the following line in /etc/fstab
virtualbox_share /media/share vboxsf defaults 0 0

Unfortunately the share will be owned by root. To make it owned and therefore writeable by a user use the following line instead. Replace the uid and gid with your information.
virtualbox_share /media/share vboxsf defaults,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

Here’s how to find your uid:
id -u username

And gid:
id -g username

Share a remote filesystem over SSH

Ryan — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:25:24 +0000

You may already be familiar with NFS and Samba for sharing files over a network. While these are both great distributed filesystem solutions, they require extra configuration and setup overhead in order to get them to work. If you want quick and easy access to a remote filesystem then SSHFS may be your best shot.

SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login. It is based on sftp (SSH File Transfer Protocol). Setup is easy on the server side, since most servers support SSH out of the box there is nothing to do. On the client side, mounting the filesystem is as easy as logging in with SSH. The end user can seamlessly and securely interact with remote files as if they were local to your machine.

Advantages of SSHFS over NFS/Samba:

Utilizes SSH and is therefore very secure.
Allows secure access to remote filesystems outside of your local network.
Requires no special configuration on the server side.

Disadvantages:

Slightly slower, although the difference is fairly small.
Does not show filesystem usage statistics.
Requires a user account on the server side.
Not a true distributed file system, single point to point sharing.

Setup

The first step is to install SSHFS.

In Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install sshfs

or in Gentoo:

$ sudo emerge -av sshfs-fuse

Create the mount point on your local machine. This is where you are going to access the remote filesystem.

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/share

Your user must have permission to access this mountpoint.

$ sudo chown ryan /mnt/share

Start Sharing

Now use the sshfs command to mount the remote filesystem. If the username is different on the server you are connecting, use the “username@host:” format, otherwise you can simply specify “host:”.

$ sshfs ryan@fileserver:/remote/share /mnt/share

If you are not using keys with SSH you will be prompted for a password.

ryan@fileserver's password:

Once you are finished you can easily unmount the filesystem.

as regular user:

$ fusermount -u /mnt/share

or as root:

$ sudo umount /mnt/share

Configuration

You can add an entry for this share to /etc/fstab to make the mounting process more seamless.

sshfs#ryan@fileserver:/remote/share /mnt/share fuse user,noauto 0 0

user – allow any user to mount this share.
noauto – stop the shared directory from being automatically mounted at startup.

If you want it automatically mounted, ensure that your SSH configuration uses keys and not passwords so it doesn’t ask for a password at startup. Once keys are in use you can safely remove the noauto option.

With fstab updated you can now mount the share as a normal user with this simple mount command. Again, if ssh is configured to use passwords you will still be prompted for one.

$ mount /mnt/share

How to mount an ISO disk image

Ryan — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:48:40 +0000

An ISO image is an archive file (disk image) of an optical disc using a conventional ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .ISO.

Many times is convenient to mount an ISO file directly instead of burning it to a CD first. Not only does this save on wasted CDs/DVDs, but allows much faster access to the ISO since it is on the hard disk itself.

Create the directory or mount point for the ISO.

$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disk

Use the mount command to mount the ISO

$ sudo mount -o loop disk_image.iso /mnt/disk

A loop device is a pseudo-device that makes a file accessible as a block device. You can now access the files within the ISO as you would a normal disk at the mount point ‘/mnt/disk’.

Skip network filesystems when searching with find

Ryan — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:45:06 +0000

When you run the find command on the root directory of a system you may want to exclude all network filesystems and confine your search to only your local machine. The benefits of this are obvious as it will save you a great amount of time especially if the mounted filesystem is very large.

Luckily the find command provides this ability with the ‘-xdev‘ or ‘-mount‘ options.

For example:

$ find / -xdev -name myfile.txt

This command will recursively search for myfile.txt starting in your root directory and skip all externally mounted filesystems.