When I’ve had trubble using my iPod with amaroK for the second time, after a complete database reformat (using iTunes in Windows – to get a FAT filesystem) I had to fix things there. After copying files to the device amaroK seemed to be stuck so that it could not change the XML files on the iPod. It stucked again when I wanted to unmount the device. Having Ubuntu Edgy updating amaroK from 1.4.2-beta to 1.4.2 the issue wasn’t solved and I suspected libgpod to be the problem. 

So, as written on the amaroK homepage I downloaded the latest CVS version of libgpod . And had to rebuild it using autogen autoconf and make. To cut a long story short – I finlly ended up with:

ACLOCAL=/usr/bin/aclocal AUTOCONF=/usr/bin/autoconf AUTOMAKE=/usr/bin/automake LIBTOOL=/usr/bin/libtool INTLTOOL=/usr/bin/intltool GTKDOCIZE=/usr/bin/gtkdocize ./autogen.sh

After fixing some things in gnome-autogen.sh (like commenting out the section on $want_gtk_doc which seemed to exceed the limit of shift) and having to copy and link the lib manually into /usr/lib – after a test application did not compile. I finially finished the installation.

Resarting amaroK I got a working iPod update. Now I can even download Videos to the device (not m4v yet) so that I have no need to use iTunes anymore.

I like that Amarok is kind of grabbing libs from everywhere and does not even stop at using gnome libs. So maybe it will stay on my system for a while to be one of the only KDE programms in a GNOME environment.