Thanks for your reply. I’ll give it a go and see what happens. I can probably tell gtkpod to store it’s playlists in a directory not under my firefly music directory–that should work okay.
BTW, I check out Yamipod and it looks interesting. From what I can tell, though one needs to have Gnome desktop running to use it, and I just use Ubuntu server with no GUI. I use x11 in OSX to tunnel in and use graphics apps (e.g., firefox) when needed.
Joe