Disclaimer: Do all instructions at your own risk. No responsibility will be claimed on possible damages incurred to your iPod. This process may also invalidate your warranty.

You may or may not be able to adjust this howto to suit your needs if you have an older generation iPod.

Much of this howto was taken from Alan Donovan. His page found here is protected under the GNU fdl

conventions:
# is assumed to mean that you are root in a shell environment
$ is assumed to mean that you are a normal user in a shell environment
bold commands are to be typed in at the appropriate prompt.

I ran through this howto using a full install of slackware 10.0 with the 2.4.26 kernel installed and the 20GB iPod.
What you will need:

• A fourth generation iPod(including usb cable) ready to be wiped of all contents or already windows formatted
• bin utils fdisk, dd, mkdosfs
• gtkpod 0.85 and associated dependencies

Having a friend w/ a Mac computer is HIGHLY beneficial
If you've already used your iPod in windows, then it has already been formatted, and you can skip to the part titled Mounting the iPod where I discuss how to interface with the iPod using usb modules and gtkpod. You may, however, want to look over briefly the beginning because it assures that your iPod is being properly recognized.
A newly purchased iPod, or an iPod that has been only used on a Mac must be formatted as a fat32 file system for the purposes of this howto. New iPods and those used only on Macs use the HFS+ filesystem. You may have noticed that linux will support HFS, but do not consider messing around with your iPod using HFS; the differences between HFS and HFS+ are numerous. However, kernel support for HFS+ is in the experimental stage, and is part of the 2.6 kernel tree. Therefore, the first part of this tutorial is aimed at getting your iPod mountable using fat32 on your linux system.