Hacking Ubuntu to support the 2nd generation iPod Nano
I don't have time to write a detailed story but hopefully this short note will
help someone. The new iPod Nano (2G) is misdetected by HAL and that causes it not
to work with higher-level apps like Banshee. The Banshee wiki has some useful debugging instructions. There's an Ubuntu patch that
looks promising. Rebuilding the hal package looked like too much work and I
didn't want to waste time installing all the required develpment packages on my
sister's machine. BTW, like some other DDs, I hate CDBS. Just give me the
damn unpacked source already! Anyhow, objdump -d
/usr/lib/hal/hald-probe-volume and find the test for VIA_SIGNATURE (0xAA55).
It looks like this:
804ceb1: 74 ae je 804ce61 <libhal_ctx_
804ceb3: 66 81 38 55 aa cmpw $0xaa55,(%eax)
804ceb8: 75 a7 jne 804ce61 <libhal_ctx_
804ceba: 80 78 02 01 cmpb $0x1,0x2(%eax)
804cebe: 89 f6 mov %esi,%esi
Next, use xxd to dump the library, search for the above section of code
and change 55 aa to 55 ab. Use xxd -r to re-create the
library. Do the same for hald-probe-storage, just for good measure. Banshee now
works like a charm with the iPod. Oh yes, I had to add a fake SysInfo file in order to make it work with Amarok. I'm not sure if that trickery is necessary for Banshee.