I'm looking for recommendation for a portable music player, like an mini-ipod (small, light, easy to use, around 4Gb space), that will work well with Linux. I like the ipods, but I don't want a music player which is so tightly bound to the software. As itunes is not supported by Apple on Linux, it means you have to resort to unofficial hacks (as far as I know) to upload music, which I don't like. I'd rather have something where the music player acts as an ordinary USB hard drive when it's plugged in, I can copy songs onto it anyway I want using regular copy/sync commands and the player will let me play by artist/album based on the file ID tags. I'd like to be able to upload custom playlists too and support for ogg music would be nice. Ipods are great, but I'd prefer to support a company which let me choose which software to use with it. I especially don't like the way they updated itunes to blacklist certain third-party ipod programs and I'm not a fan of DRM technology or their spats with MS/Real over licensing. I found this gave a nice overview of some of new players emerging (screenshots and descriptions of about 30 devices). Any recommendations would be appreciated.

You might want to look into the iRiver H320 or H340 (the latter being the bigger, more expensive varient). It's in the same price range as the iPod (likely from being mini-HDD based), but supports a couple extra little features (Ogg Vorbis, FM tuner, et cetera). From what I've read, it appears to Linux just like any other simple USB device. Worth a look, at least...

For what it's worth, it was what I was looking into, in case I ever had too much money on my hands :P.

Or you can buy memory card based mp3 player and use any card reader (most of them act as usb mass storage devices, so they are of course supported in linux) upload music...

I have a Creative Muvo^2 which is 4GB, very compact and works as a normal USB drive under Linux (and Windows and probably Macs too). The only thing on your list it doesnt do is OGG, but WAV, MP3 and WMA are all supported (I've never used WMA as it has silly licensing stuff).

In the UK you can find it online for about 130 pounds which is very reasonable I think.