iPod nano on Mandriva 2006

We got my daughter got an iPod nano for Christmas, and on Christmas day I was busy trying to get it to work on Linux. Currently the whole family use Mandriva 2006. The version of the nano we have is the PC+Mac version. According to a ZoneO-tips it is better to get the PC only version, but in this case it is not a problem. Plug it in and it automatically mounts as a USB mass storage device (give it a few seconds to work) and pops up as a disk drive in "Devices". It also automatically mounted as /mnt/IPOD without any intervention. This is only part of the story as you need to put mp3 files in the database not just in the right folder. To do this you need a linux equivalent of "iTunes" such as gtkpod or Banshee. My problem was I could not find binary packages for these for Mandriva 2006 (I would be ok with 2007, but I don't feel like upgrading yet).

I whiled away a happy 40mins while half watching Christmas TV and stroking the new kitten trying to install from source or source rpm either gtkpod or banshee, or the binary rpm for 2007. I got tangled in a quagmire of dependencies. In the end, in hope rather than expectation I tried a binary rpm for Fedora Core.
gtkpod-0.88-1.1.fc2.rf.i386.rpm. This worked fine. The only tweak was to go in to Setup on gtkpod and change /mnt/ipod to /mnt/IPOD.

TuxMobil lists this, as well as lots of other sites with Linux/iPod related information. In particular there are plenty of other alternatives to iTunes for linux I could have tried.