[Cialug] iPod/Linux oddity

[Tony Bibbs]

For whatever reason when my iPod gets mounted under Linux at some point I lose all my playlists on the iPod.  They simply disappear from the iPod's menu.  Even odder however, is if I launch Amarok it sees all the playlists fine.  My hopes is that since I *never* sync the iPod to Linux I want to force Linux to mount the iPod at /mnt/ipod and I want it to be mounted read-only which should hopefully solve the problem of them disappearing playlists.

First problem is the iPod gets a generic device name like /dev/sdb2 which is completely dependent on the order in which it is plugged in relative to other devices.  I'd like it to get the device name /dev/ipod.  My understanding is this *should* be doable via hal and I've got this in my /etc/hal/fdi/policy/90-user-methods.fdi:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="@block.storage_device:storage.model" string="iPod">
      <merge key="volume.policy.desired_mount_point" type="string">ipod</merge>
      <merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.iocharset=iso8859-15" type="bool">true</merge>
      <merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.sync" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Assuming that is right, my next question is how do I get it to mount at /mnt/ipod as read-only?  Is it as simple as an entry in /etc/fstab?

--Tony