How to handle an iPod inside KDE (Gentoo) – Amarok/Dbus/HAL/Pmount

| July 16th, 2008

This is a summary of what I did to get my iPod (80G Video – Black) working inside KDE. Please, feel free to send comments and  questions ;)

First of all, I installed these applications:

  • DBus
  • HAL
  • Pmount
  • Amarok

And made sure KDE was compiled with HAL support, and Amarok with ipod support. As I use Gentoo, I did:

[code]#USE="hal ipod" emerge dbus pmount hal amarok kdebase [/code]

Then I put my user on the plugdev group (pmount mounts things using this group), and set HAL and DBus services to start upon system boot. In Gentoo we can use the rc-update tool:

[code]
#gpasswd -a trustlix plugdev
#rc-update add hald default
#rc-update add dbus default
[/code]

Great! After that I started both hald and dbus, and restarted my X.

[code]
#/etc/init.d/dbus start
#/etc/init.d/hald start
#/etc/init.d/xdm restart
[/code]

To make sure my KDE was working with HAL support, I went to Control Center -> Peripherals -> Storage Media -> Advanced.  The option “Enable HAL backend” must be marked.

After all these steps, I finally plugged the iPod on the USB port and started Amarok, which automatically recognized it.

Last thing I did was to click on the “Connect” button, that showed me a window asking for the mount/umount commands I’d like to use, and I put:

  • pmount %d
  • pumount %d

For both mount and umount commands, respectively.

And that was it. Hope it helps someone! :)

Posted in english, gentoo, howtos, linux, tips | 1 Comment »