iPod shuffle

I was hoping to grab one of these last week for my flight to my grandma's funeral, but availability on them is still tight so we just added our names to the waiting list at the Apple store (3-4week wait expected). So I was surprised to get a call yesterday that they were in.

Jenn and I both bought the 1GB model. So far hers caused her windows computer to crash. Installing the software on my Powerbook (iTunes, Quicktime and iPod Installer updates) has crashed the computer and left it in a wierd state.

How hard can it be to make a reliable USB Mass Storage Device? Plugging in into linux shows a simple USB mass storage device with no partition table...presumably I can just write audio files to it and listen to them?

UPDATE: Seems like the iPod firmware updater crashed and somehow hosed my YellowDogLinux installation (which was mounted in OSX read-write). That left the ext driver in OSX trying to fsck and mount the hosed YDL drive. I kind of needed to reinstall YDL anyway after I messed it up a bit upgrading to 4.0, so I did. I also set OSX to mount it read-only normally. At that point things started working again. Jenn had a few more Windows blue screens at the end of trying to transfer tracks to her shuffle, but then it started working.