Despite the recent news, about the new iPods being locked to iTunes exclusively, it looks like iTunes won’t have exclusive access to them much longer. The Amarok devs have posted in their blog that they have managed to crack Apple’s new protection, and soon iPod Classic will be supported in an upcoming version of their media player.
This means that it is now “safe” for Linux users to purchase an iPod Classic, but until the team releases their next update on Amarok, you won’t be able to get music on it without iTunes.
There’s a patch out, and it’s a trivial matter to get it running.
Still doesn’t fix the inferior sound chips in the Classic.
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2007/09/10/cirrus-audio-codec-designed-into-ipod-classic-displacing-wolfson-says-roth-capital/?mod=yahoobarrons
Read some of the amazon.com reviews of the 160Gb, or look around Apple forums, sound quality is “audibly inferior” to older models.
The firmware is also still encrypted, so you can forget about iPodLinux or RockBox for the time being.
6G sucks :(