Failed methods

While I was turning Google inside out to find a method, I tried a lot of suggestions. Because none of them worked for me, I thought it would be useful to mention them here:

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator)
Most of the Linux users will be familiar with Wine. It's an excellent tool to port windows .exe's to run on Linux distributions. Unfortunately iTunes only partially works with Wine. You will be able to run and install it, but it won't be able to detect your iPod. I found the cause of it at the Apple forum: some unregistered dll-files.
I have copied the dll-files from a windowsbox to the system32 directory in Wine (/home/user/.wine/.../system32/), but those dll-files wouldn't register correctly. So maybe someone could dig further here and find a solution...

VMWare Server
This is a very good (and free) emulator for virtual operating systems, but it has one critical disadvantage: no USB 2.0 support, while new iPods require USB 2.0 to synchronize. You will notice that your iPod will be detected, but only as a USB storage device, not as an iPod.

VMWare Workstation
This distribution of VMWare is better than VMWare Server, but it's not free. You can register for a 30-day valid registration key, but after that you will have to buy a license key. One essential advantage in this emulator is the support for USB 2.0.
I have tried the emulator in the 30-day period. I succeeded in installing iTunes and synchronizing my iPod, but somehow my host (Ubuntu) crashes after some time while using VMWare Workstation. So no problem with the synchronisation, but it crashes (in my case) and it's expensive.