iPod support does exist under Liinux and I have listed some links below if anyone is interested.
I was able to plug in my iPod 2nd Gen and Linux automatically mounted it. The filesystem is browsable but it is encrypted so your files are named something like AUNG.ma4. You cannot copy files directly to the mounted path.
I do not know how it would work with the latest generation iPods given that Apple changed the encryption. There is a URL below from 2009 where the latest iPod Classic did not work. But who knows maybe it is fixed today.
There are Music players that do sync to the iPod and I believe they all use the same underlying libraries. I tried Banshee. Music would sync but Playlists has a quirk where you it would only sync songs in the Playlist that belonged to the album of the first song. Syncing was also very slow. One Album took 5 mins. The same Album in iTunes took 50 seconds. It is too slow to be practical.
I did not test other players to see if they had the same limitations as Banshee because I want to use JRiver. So I have gone back to the bullet proof, future proof solution. That is JRiver sync to a Folder. Run iTunes in a VM . To make sure iTunes does not "trash" my Windows-7 VM, I simply copied the VM and that is now my iTunes VM.
As you all know iTunes is crap. iTunes 11 is worse than crap so my advice is to stick to iTunes 10 and never upgrade to iTunes 11. It's Apple trying to dumb down apps and remove features so they look and feel the same on PC, iPad, iPhone.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPodhttps://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IPod#iPod_management_appshttp://ramble.karrth.com/archives/70