gtkpod and xmms

It's always one thing leads to another, and before you know it you almost forget why you are doing this in the first place.

I was trying to get my first generation 512MB gum stick iPod shuffle to load and play songs.

I got the gtkpod to work in Ubuntu 7.10 okay so this isn't exactly new to me. However, you know there is always a catch or something is wrong, otherwise life in the Linux world would be boring. Though Ubuntu claims to just work, I just don't believe it.

I got the song loading okay but when I try to right click the song to play it just says xmms command not found. So that begins my quest to find out what the heck that xmms is. For the die hard, it's the only audio player that should be on the machine. Anyway. I found some good sources and was able to follow the blow by blow installation instruction, i.e. getting the source and compiling the program, which I don't get to do too often. Of course, my newly minted Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't have the C library or the GTK+ to compile, so again it took me quite some time to figure out what ingredients I actually need and from where to get them.

Here is an excellent write up, this is especially helpful for a Linux newbie like myself. Here is another one that is like what should have been there but not there in 8.04 kind of write-up.