Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux that is gaining market share slowly but surely. Many wondered if Ubuntu works with Apple’s gadget iPod. This article is for them.

You will be happy to know that Ubuntu does iPods, even Nanos. You will also be happy to know that using your iPod on your Ubuntu system is quite easy.

All you have to do is to plug your iPod into a USB port and Ubuntu will do the rest. It will mount and dismount the device by itself without your help.

Because the device is kind of new and that Ubuntu is still a young distribution, there were reports that in rare cases the users encountered difficulties and odd behavior.

Some said that if you happen to crash your computer while you are working with the iPod, you have a small chance to lose all your data. If this thing happens, you can do the following: bring your computer in Windows and use Apple’s iPod Updater to bring the iPod to normal state and to repopulate it with music.

As for playback, Ubuntu allows you to listen to some formats. If you have MP3, all is fine because in the end they are MP3. If, however, you have files encoded in iTunes’ default AAC format, you should be aware that Linux does not have much in the way of playback support. Only XMMS, installed along with the XMMS-MP4 plugin, seems to provide an easy way for you to play such files. AAC files you might have bought from the iTunes store-well, forget about playing those back on Linux.

There is one big problem with regard to encoded audio formats (and it isn’t a limitation only in Linux): iPods do not support Ogg Vorbis files. Apple might include support in future iPods but there’s only talks, nothing more. In the meantime, you can quite simply convert your Ogg Vorbis files to MP3 format for use on your iPod, though there will be a bit of a loss in quality (Both formats have their own, incompatible methods of compression which require the throwing out of actual music data.) Of course, if you originally encoded your audio files in FLAC format, this quality issue will be moot.

This is all about about Ubuntu and iPods but I’m sure that if you are interested in more details, you can google it. Wait, you can’t google it because Google doesn’t like it.