I have discovered that mac ipods (those that have been restored to factory settings on a mac) are read by Ubuntu as read-only, which means you can’t change the music on a mac ipod from a Ubuntu machine [1]. Alternatively, windows ipods (those restored on a windows machine) are read/writable, which means you can upload new music to that ipod.

I figured this out after reading the ipod linux (a version of linux that runs on your ipod) installlation instructions. ipod linux requires that the ipod you want to install ipod linux on is a windows ipod. Since we don’t have a working windows machine at my house, I used a windows machine my husband brought home from work and restored the ipod to its factory settings on it. Thinking that the reason that ipod linux requires that windows ipods be used, I plugged my ipod up to my linux machine and tada, it wasn’t read-only!

1: I didn’t think about this until later, but I am guessing that I could have changed the device’s permissions using sudo. I thought I had tried that, but I guess I didn’t do it correctly.

Ok, the idea for this very lazy post came from this site that has a very cool collection of movies available free on YouTube and similar sites.

Pirates of the Silicon Valley in its entirety is on YouTube. Enjoy!