HOWTO: ipod nano & gtkpod

I struggled a few hours with making my Ipod Nano (4th generation, 8Gb, black) work with gtkpod, so i thought i would share that with other board members.

My last Ipod (Nano, 2nd generation, 2Gb, black) worked out of the box with just adding new Ipod repository and selecting the correct model. But this one wouldn't. It kept complaining about some firewire stuff. After a bit of googling I found out that, in order for this to work, i need to append
Code:
FirewireGuid: 0xffffffffffffffff
to iPod_Control/Device/SysInfo. On Linux it appears that FirewireGuid can be obtained from lsusb output. FreeBSD trail led me to getserial.c script from http://50hz.ws/dev/, but i couldn't make it work.

Now, when adding gtkpod from packages, it installs libgpod without SysInfo detection utility, which apparently was what i needed. So i 'make deinstall clean'-ed /usr/ports/audio/libgpod, 'make config'-ed it, and marked 'TOOLS' option. 'make reinstall clean' pulled sg3_utils dependency, but the installation failed. Next, i compiled and installed /usr/ports/sysutils/sg3_utils separately, and then went back to libgpod, unchecked 'TOOLS' option and recompiled it once more which ended in a success.

The rest was easy. I queried my Ipod with
Code:
shakti#sg_inq -i /dev/ad0
as root, and there it was, the needed FirewireGuid, just ond the end of output, below 'Vendor Specific Extension Identifier'. I opened iPod_Control/Device/SysInfo and appended FirewireGuid one line under existing ModelNumStr, so finally my SysInfo file looked like this:
Code:
ModelNumStr: xB754
FirewireGuid: 0x000a27001e2daa32
I did it with gedit but i could have also echoed it from console and appended it with >> or typed it in in vi.

Yay! Bye bye to ITunes once again! Ah, and one more tip about restoring your Ipod in case it becomes unusable. Just make sure you backup your Ipod folder structure somewhere. Later on, you can restore it just by formatting it (with fat32 in windoze version) or deleting all files from it, and pasting backed up folder structure back onto it.

Hope someone will find this helpful...
 
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