I got it working with both USB and firewire. If you ahve firewire running then by all means use it. It is much faster especially if you have multiple USB devices connected. (USB uses polling so the more devices connect the slower it is regardless if any data is being transfered).

Dont spent the time trying to get it all formetted in *nix. Just use iTunes to format it Windows. Ephpod did not work under windows, dont mess with it. I had to restore the iPod after trying to use it.

After formatting it Windows i added a line in /etc/fstab specifing the mount point and a filesystem of vfat.

:NOTE: On my computer the iPod registers as 2 devices, sda1 and sda2. sda2 is the one you want. Also, when i used filesystem of "auto" it defaulted to msdos. This clipped my dir names and gtkpod couldnt find the iTuned DB :/NOTE:

Mount the iPod then open gtkpod and change the preferences so it is looking for the iPod at the correct mount point. I'm not going to go into how to use gtkpod but is is very easy to figure out.

To safely disconnect the iPod unmount it then use "eject -s" to get the "Do not unplug" screen to go away. Eject errors for me but the screen goes away and that is all that matters.

All in all i love it! Check out kaudiocreator for a good progam to rip with. It can use LAME as an encoder so you can do VBR MP3's.

I have the 40 GB iPod with firmware 3.1. So far it's been working great formatted as HFS+.

To mount the iPod I typed 'mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdb3 /media/ipod'. You will have to create the directory to mount the ipod (you might choose /mnt/ipod, etc.) and you might need to run 'modprobe hfsplus' before you can mount the iPod. I have not added a fstab entry yet, but might do so in the future.

Unfortunately I don't have firewire working on my machine, so I've only tested the iPod through my USB 1.1 ports (incredibly slow compared to firewire).