To make a long story short: If you’re a Linux addicted guy having an iPod (no iPhone, no iPod Touch, but all others) who wants to manage his collection in a Linux environment, you probably want to use Floola. It’s a most widely platform independent program with no need to install. It comes within a single binary which makes use of a few dependent libraries, but overall you’re free to store it directly on your iPod to use it from almost anywhere.

So how to use it in Ubuntu/Debian?

First of all, download the tar.gz from its website and extract the archive’s content in a directory you prefer.

user@server:~/Desktop$ tar xzf Floola-linux.tar.gz
user@server:~/Desktop$ cd Floola-linux/
user@server:~/Desktop/Floola-linux$ ls
Floola  Readme.txt

You might try to run Floola via ./Floola now, but most users, especially 64-Bit OS freaks, need to install additional 32-Bit libraries to get it working:
In case you haven’t done this yet, download the deb of getlibs and install it on your system. It’s a commandline tool to ease the installation of libaries. When this step is done, you’re ready to install the missing libraries as seen below.

user@server:~$ getlibs -32 libgstbase-0.10.so.0 libxine.so.1
user@server:~$ getlibs -p gstreamer0.10-alsa
user@server:~$ getlibs -p libgstreamer0.10-0
user@server:~$ getlibs -p libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0
user@server:~$ getlibs -p gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
user@server:~$ getlibs -l libmad.so.0 libmpeg2.so.0 libdvdread.so.3 liboil-0.3.so.0 libsidplay.so.1
user@server:~$ getlibs liba52-0.7.4.so libcdio.so.7 libid3tag.so.0

After these steps you should be ready to run Floola without problems. In case of a problem you probably want to take a look into Floola’s documentation and FAQs. They’re also running a forum over there where you can turn in bug reports or make suggestions for new features.