I'm trying to put music on a 2GB blue 3rd gen iPod Shuffle (the long metal bodied version) using gtkpod on current Arch Linux. While the files get stored on the ipod, when I try to listen to music the ipod just says "please use iTunes to sync music". The model in question is listed as supported by gtkpod, so What's going wrong?

Beats me, I get the same problem on the silver 4 GB model...

Turns out the model is NOT supported. 'Generation' numbering differs, so what is sometimes called "third gen" is other times called "4th gen". And the 2GB brushed metal versions are so new they're not even mentioned on the gtkpod website.

I had to resort to running iTunes in Windows XP in VirtualBox. Even there, the latest iTunes crashes, I had to get version 9.2 (or was it 9.0.2?) from oldapps.com. I also needed the commercial version of VirtualBox - the OSE doesn't support USB devices - and that in turn needs libpng1.2; my distro had 1.4. (I wish I'd known about oldapps to start with, I might have been able to run an iTunes version in Wine, rather than using a VM which runs like a dog on my ancient system).

Nightmare, absolute nightmare. I now hate Apple with a passion. Fortunately it wasn't my iPod, so I won't have to do it again.

I tried an old version of iTunes under Wine,; I guess some people get it to work, but I had little luck, and similarly it was essentially no joy in VirtualBox (not OSE) or VMWare, I tried the latest version as well as n-1.... it ran, supposedly it worked, but then the music didn't actually get transferred from CD to disk or to the device.

I think I'll have to fire up the dual boot configuration again, unfortunately.