I have a 30gig video ipod, and just installed SimplyMepis 6.0, and am trying to get the ipod to work with Amarok.
First attempt gave me the lock file problem.  I worked around it using suggestions here.
Second attempt gave me the unable to find itunesdb problem.  Ditto: worked around.  (chkdsk \F using an XP machine.)
With both these done, the ipod mounts, I can see what's on it, but I still can't transfer files.  When I try, it just gives me an 'failed to copy file' failure, followed (when I try to disconnect the device) by unable to write ipod database failure and failed to execute disconnect script failure.
Does anyone have suggestions?  The ipod automounts under mepis: should I disable this?  Should it be connected but not mounted, letting Amarok mount and unmount?  How, while I'm on the subject, can I edit the mount and unmount scripts?  When I hit 'disconnect' it seems to unmount /media/ipod and I'd rather it did eject /media/ipod since that seems to be resulting in problem #2: unable to find itunesdb because of corrupted database.
I really, truly do not want to go down the format-and-repartition-and-copy-the-OS route because every time I do something like that it goes wrong in ways that everyone claims are absolutely impossible, and it takes me months to fix it.  (It took me roughly 65 tries to get Mepis installed and functional, for instance, involving three computers, four processors, and four hard drives, even though every single combination easily installed and ran XP and/or RH9/FC4.)  So if there's a way to fix this using fdisk, fsck, and windows-based itunes/chkdsk utilities, I'd really appreciate it.
I'm not a complete newbie -- I've been using unix since the '80's and linux since the mid-90's -- but I am new to KDE and Amarok.

Further experiments: unmounting /media/ipod (or /dev/sdb2) makes Amarok unable to connect to the ipod, so automounting doesn't seem to be the problem.  Quitting Amarok, plugging in the ipod, then restarting, doesn't make any difference.  Any way I do it, if Amarok is running and the ipod is mounted, I can copy files from the ipod to the host PC (they show up in the right pane, but are not actually written to the PC, I just found out, after typing the previous sentence in), but I cannot copy files the other way.  This could be a permissions problem (I am running as root on the host PC) or it could be a problem with the database modification, and I have no way of distinguishing which is which.  When I do attempt to transfer a file, it tries -- the transfer bar runs up to 100% before failing, so it looks like it's moving data but cannot modify the weird itunes database to acknowledge the file transfer.
OP