Advice on which distro works well with an ipod shuffle?

[w3rthers]

I'm attempting to put some life into my mums laptop it's a dell 1520, 1.8ghz celeron 1gig ram onboard gfx. It had vista on before and that was slooooooow!

She only uses it for basic stuff like internet and a few photos. However my sister bought her a ipod shuffle so I need some way of accessing it and changing the tracks on it, preferably something easy so she can do it.

I installed puppy linux but I had a problem with getting anything for the ipod to work, one program broke puppy and the desktop lost all the icons. Other than that the OS was fine, really rapid!

So I thought I should ask some people in the know and I've done the distro quiz and come out with openSUSE.

Will this be ok speedwise? I don't mind if it's slower than puppy.
What software is the best and easiest to use for ipod shuffles? (it's a 2gig 2010 model 4th gen)
Also since I had puppy on before will I have to do anything to the GRUB from puppy?

Thanks for any help

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

I don't actually own any Apple products, so I'm going to give some second-hand advice here.
Amarok supposedly does a decent job of managing iPod playlists. I think the only think it has trouble with is the title art for the albums.
See here: How to use Amarok to manage your iPod - How-To Geek

[w3rthers]

Thanks for the advice but after a little digging I found that because it has the voice thing that tells you what track it is, it will only work with evil itunes. I tried running virtualbox with vista (what it originally came with) but it doesn't recognize the ipod and it blue screened once so as it's for my mum I'm going to dual boot linux and have a second partition with vista that she can use for itunes now all I need to get it a nice simple bootup manager and it should be ok.

[jmadero]

Not sure what voice thing you're referring to but I just read that the Apple Shuffle 4th Gen will work just fine with a lot of distros (using banshee at least, I'm sure other players work as well). I openly and repetitively state in the forums how much I despise apple and all of their products but the amazing devs in our community have worked around their roadblocks to make things work relatively smoothly. I'd try Mint if I were you. Also, maybe consider selling that Apple product and switching over to one of the many better players that not only play nice with open source devs but some even go further to support other formats other than mp3's. I have the Cowon S9, fully skinnable, easy to use, supports ogg files.

Article: Sync your iPod Shuffle with Linux | WiredRevolution.com