“I recently received an iPod Nano as a gift. My Nano is amazingly small, contains a gigabyte of storage, and sounds very good through its ear buds. It didn’t take long for me to learn that folks have been putting Linux on iPods for a couple of years now, courtesy of the iPodLinux Project. Granted, the software for the Nano and most fourth- and fifth-generation versions of the iPod is experimental. Linux on my desktop, workstation, laptop, Tivo, and router. I had to have it on the Nano, too. Here’s my report how I converted my stock iPod Nano into a dual-booting, sweet MP3-singing, iDoom-playing monster.”
Now that you have linux installed on your ipod, tell us what you use your ipod for. If it was merely for playing music and file storage then it would be a waste of time going through these steps.
Last time I looked, it was the only way to use an iPod to do decent quality audio recording.
Last time I looked, it was the only way to use an iPod to do decent quality audio recording.
Unfortunately, audio recording doesn’t work with the Nano…I was a bit disappointed as this was my primary reason to install Linux on my 4GB Nano, but apparently the hardware doesn’t support it.
wouldn’t be a waste of time if you wanted to play more formats (ogg, anyone?)
Wouldn’t be a waste at all if it was the 4gb version..
Either way congrats author of article for Linuxing your ipod and congrats on your ipod in general.
Playing videos is cool, and so is playing Tetris, Space Invaders, Pong and other games not on the original iPod.
iPodLinux is still in its infancy, but already it’s quite impressive what they’ve achieved. Stop being such a party pooper!
You may have misunderstood what I was asking or I could have been a little more clear in what I was asking. Yes those games are available and you will load them, but will you actually use them? My ipod has a few games on it, I played them once or twice, but thats about it. The rest of the time its just for listening to music while I do other things.
Well, as soon as we get compressed video support you could presumably use the Nano as a video viewer.
Don’t get me wrong, uses are limited and this is mostly for tinkerers and hobbyists. That said, this is OSNews, so this is the kind of useless-but-neat stuff you’d expect to see.
That said, I did spend quite some time playing Tetris (called “Bluecube”) and Minesweeper, however it drains the battery like crazy (because the screen is always on). I’m waiting for some Internet-through-USB connectivity, so you can download stuff like lyrics and so on. I’m sure with a little imagination there could be some useful things to be done with this…
You may have misunderstood what I was asking or I could have been a little more clear in what I was asking. Yes those games are available and you will load them, but will you actually use them? My ipod has a few games on it, I played them once or twice, but thats about it. The rest of the time its just for listening to music while I do other things.
Well, it would be nice to have a device as ubiquitous as the iPod (esp for the myrad of accessories), but not at the expense of missing features that my iAudio player has (such as disabling track skipping and bookmarking in non-Audible audio files). If a hack like this could add in these missing features, I would definitely buy one.
Edited 2006-04-06 23:13
I did the same thing when I bought my 4GB nano. But it gets old pretty fast. I got good at shooting in iDoom, but the battery goes down pretty fast when playing doom or watching movies.
Long movies tends to loose their audio/video sync. I couldn’t even watch an entire Family Guy episode. The 10 last minutes were completely out of sync. I could pause and sometimes it would fix the problem, sometimes not.
The UI themes are quite ugly. They sure mimic the apple interface a little more.
After some time it would boot in linux anymore, It would stop with a kernel panic.
But anyway, showing iDoom and some porn movies on your nano to your buddies is priceless!
The UI themes are quite ugly. They sure mimic the apple interface a little more.
That’s Podzilla v1. Podzilla v2 looks much nicer, and has more themes, even some that mimic the Apple look. It’s still lacking a lot of features, however (it’s a more modular approach than v1, but lots of modules aren’t ready yet, including playing movies).
When I originally checked the project, iPodLinux sucked batteries dry faster than normal. Have they mitigated/fixed that in the meantime?
<quote>Linux on my desktop, workstation, laptop, Tivo, and router. </quote>
I couldn’t help but remember that old xbill game, but with Tux the Penguin instead of BillG…
what’s the point?
Bah… post a link when you’ve got it running on your shuffle!
According to the iPodLinux site, Linux will NOT be ported to the Shuffle (mostly because it doesn’t have a screen, nor a clickwheel). So don’t hold your breath.
to have Linux on an iPod. Period.