I've followed the "iPod and iPod mini on Linux Quick Guide" (do a google search, I don't have enough posts to post a link) religiously.

I tried to mount the iPod after that, but it just gave this error:
c68:/home/tom# mount -t vfat /dev/sda2 /mnt/ipod
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2,
missing codepage, or too many mounted file systems

After doing that, I got this error from dmesg:
Unable to load NLS charset iso8859-1
FAT: IO charset iso8859-1 not found

Okay, so after that I do a bit of googling, enable NLS ISO 8859-1 support in my kernel, and recompile. So it should work now, right? Nope, I still get the error from dmesg saying it can't load the charset.

i think this is your main problem. google around, and you'll see you need to disable EFI partitions on your kernel compile.

I searched my kernel config for CONFIG_EFI_PARTITIONS but nothing came up.