I bought myself a refurbished 60GB black iPod video (5th gen.) for $229 (plus tax) at the Apple store. I decided to buy one for my wife for her upcoming birthday; unfortunately, it appears that they're all sold out now.

Getting it working with my laptop running Fedora Core 6 was pretty simple using gtkpod.

# yum -y install gtkpod
# mkdir /mnt/ipod
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/ipod
# gtkpod &

Caveat: The above is simplified. Be sure to set permissions correctly so that you don't have to run gtkpod as root. ;)

As someone had pointed out, you can get rid of the "Do not disconnect" screen and leave the iPod charging while being able to use it by using eject(1).

# eject /mnt/ipod

Useful links:

• Video iPod and Linux
• GtkPod