I think I finally figured out the problem I was having with syncing my iPod via Amarok. The key seems to be that some other KDE services need to be running in order for the iPod to be fully identified properly. Without those services, it shows up but gets treated like a generic, unidentified iPod and there’s no history for it to sync against.
The thing that made it inconsistent was that I wasn’t always running the full KDE environment. Sometimes I’d export it via X11 to my laptop, and after the recent reinstall I was running Gnome instead of KDE for a while. I should be okay as long as I keep using KDE as my desktop and always run it at the console, which shouldn’t be too big a deal as it’s about the only thing I use the console for nowadays anyway.
I paid for and used a third party program to sync my ipod; now that I have vista I’ll have to pay to update it, but I find myself wondering why I should bother. for all that I made fun of a friend of mine for saying he mostly used itunes to play music now, it might just be simpler in the end to install it and get it done with!
At least you can get any sync’ing at all — Amarok & Rhythmbox just think my iPod is just another hard drive. Think I need to hard-reset it?
Failkan: I’ve heard a lot of good recommendations of MediaMonkey, if that’s not the program you’re already talking about. They have a free version, at least. It’s what I was considering switching to if I couldn’t get this working the way I wanted.
Paul: I haven’t tried RhythmBox yet, but under Amarok I do still need to mount the iPod filesystem first. I have an fstab entry like:
UUID=1863-F6C0 /mnt/ipod vfat rw,user 0 0mount the iPod there, and then Amarok automatically recognizes it’s there and does its stats and last.fm syncing. You may need to go to the device settings section and make sure the full device description is showing up, but if you’re running Gnome, you may be experiencing the same problems I was noting above and that I had to run KDE to fix.