iPod mini + ASUS P3B-F motherboard + FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE

Toomas Aas toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee
Mon May 30 14:38:39 PDT 2005


Is anyone successfully using this mix of old and new technology? I'm 
trying to, but I'm not succeeding.

The on-board USB ports on this machine are USB1.1, which, while not 
"officially" supported by Apple, should work with iPod according to many 
reports on the Net. I do understand that it would be very slow, though.

The very first time I took the iPod out of the package and connected it 
to my PC, it was recognized successfully:

May 30 20:08:32 premium kernel: umass0: Apple iPod mini, rev 2.00/0.01, 
addr 2
May 30 20:12:52 premium kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
May 30 20:12:52 premium kernel: da0: <Apple iPod 1.62> Removable Direct 
Access SCSI-0 device

Note, however, that there's a 4 minute time gap between umass0 and da0 
lines.

Since my machine doesn't have any support for reading the HFS (or is it 
HFS+?) file system which is what the iPod has out of the box, I couldn't 
however mount any slices from da0. I tried disconnecting and 
re-connecting the iPod a few times and now the umass0 line appears but 
the da0 line doesn't appear at all, even after waiting for 40 minutes.

I went to a Windows PC with USB2 ports and connected the iPod to that. 
It was recognized immediately and re-formatted as FAT32. Back to my 
FreeBSD PC and there's no change - when plugging in the iPod, the umass0 
line appears in dmesg, but the da0 line doesn't.

What would be the best course of action to get the iPod talking to my 
FreeBSD box?
- install an add-on USB 2.0 card ?
- update the PC-s BIOS to latest version (there is a newer version than
   the one I'm running now)?
- update to latest -STABLE (current checkout is from May 10)?
- wipe FreeBSD and install Windows? (just kidding!!!)
- something else?

---
... Windows NT - the world's only 80 MB solitaire game!


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