Fun with gtkpod on FC-13

Connected my Ipod Video to my FC-13 machine. It was immediately detected and mounted. Fired up gtkpod and got the file listing without hitch. Made a few changes by adding and deleting a few songs. This too went ahead smoothly. I then quit after saving changes,

After the ipod was unmounted and detached from the USB port, all the songs had DISAPPEARED! But the available space indicated that the files were in there somewhere. Plugged it bak into the USB and gtkpod faithfully listed all the files.

Went back to Itunes on my Vista laptop. Initially vista would not detect the ipod. I reset the ipod while it was still plugged into the USB. Then it got detected. Started itunes, first and foremost updated to the latest firmware version 1.13. After the new firmware got installed, the ipod did a self reset. iTunes then displayed all the songs without any loss.

Did a thorough research on the net and found that in order to not mess up the ipod database the following has to be done before first time using gtkpod:

1. Plug in the ipod into the USB.

2. Open a terminal window. Become superuser by "su -" command.

3. Run command "mount" You can see the mount details of the ipod.
This line will have the actual name of the ipod and its mount
point usually in the /media folder. We need two values from
this line. In my case they were "/dev/sdb2" and "/media/STEVE".
STEVE is the name of my ipod. The first value is the device
associated to the ipod and the second its mount point.

4. Run the command:

/usr/bin/ipod-read-sysinfo-extended /dev/sdb2 /media/STEVE

Replace the two values as per the result of your "mount" command.

5. Unmount the ipod and replug it. Now you can run gtkpod safely
to file manipulations in the ipod without making the files disappear :-)

I found http://gtkpod.wikispaces.com quite useful in my quest to restore my ipod without losing anything.

GnuCash 2.2.9 on FC-13

FC-13 comes bundled with the 2.3.11 version of GnuCash. Unfortunately this version is not compatible with 2.2 and earlier versions and will not recognize the file headers while trying to open data files of those versions. This means doom for users who upgraded mid-year and found data incompatibility.

I ran :

rpm -qa | grep gnucash

Then the following were listed:

gnucash-2.3.11-1.fc13.i686
gnucash-docs-2.2.0-4.fc12.noarch

removed the two packages separately using

rpm -ev package-full-name --nodeps

I downloaded the source 2.2.9 tar file from the GnuCash website and got about compiling it in FC-13. So here is the procedure I had to adopt to get it running.

Afer the above tar file is extracted. Run the "./configure" command as root from the extracted directory. This may have to be done many times because each time some lib files etc., may be found missing and we need to install them through the Gnome software manager.

After a clean exit is made from "./configure". Run the "make" command, in my case I got an error "goffice/graph/gog-style.h: No such file or directory".

From wiki.gnucash.org, I found the solution.

uninstalled "goffice-devel-0.8.1-1.fc13.i686" and "goffice-0.8.1-1.fc13.i686" using

rpm -ev package-full-name --nodeps

downloaded "goffice-0.6.6-4.fc12.i686.rpm" and "goffice-devel-0.6.6-4.fc12.i686.rpm" from "http://rpm.pbone.net"

installed these by

rpm -ivh package-full-name --nodeps

Ran the "./configure" and "make" commands again.

This time, the "make" exited without error. Then I ran the "make install" command and a working GnuCash 2.2.9 got installed.