On Oct 30, 2007, at 4:43 PM, steve wrote:
its not possible to listen and charge an ipod on any platform with the "ipod firmware".
Not true. If I plug my iPod mini into my MacOS X machine, then eject it in Finder, it will continue to charge but I'll have control again.
This also works under Linux with AmaroK and recent version of GTKpod, assuming you have sufficient permissions to unmount the device. However, if you just mount and unmount it without running AmaroK or GTKpod, it will display the 'DO NOT DISCONNECT' screen until you, well, disconnect it. ;) I haven't looked at the source code of those two apps, but I suspect there's some flag that must be set on the iPod before the OS unmounts it so it knows it's been cleanly disconnected. Probably Apple is trying to protect the internal database it uses from corruption.
BTW, this behavior may be slightly different depending on the filesystem your iPod is using. Mine is vfat because I originally set it up on a Windows system. iPods originally set up on a Mac will be HFSv2, and I don't have any experience with that.