rullzer

Today I found myself listing to my ipod when a project I read about some time ago poped into my head. ipodlinux yup that is right linux on your ipod. So this morning I decided to give it a try.

The first thing I encounterd was that the GUI install program reguires libcrypto.so.0.9.7 and well 0.9.7 is not even in portage anymore that was out of the question. However I think else I also would have done the manual install since well then I can control all the aspects of the installation myself . But the guid was very clear and in no time I had ipodlinux running. And well I got to tell you it is quite a kick when you see those kernel messaages scrolling over your ipod screen.

However not everything was as good as it seemd. The ipodlinux guys do yet support the 5G ipods so I had no music player. I could still boot the original ipod but well what was the point then. So I decided to install rockbox which was recomended me by Sander.

Installing rockbox was even easier then ipodlinux. Just configuring the bootloader of ipodlinux was enough. Man all things should be that simple! A huge advantage of rockbox is that when a new version is released just extracting a new verion on the ipod will be enought to get it running.

But now comes what I like most about rockbox. No more weird apple database! I can just store the files on my ipod. Now amarok did a nice job in managing my ipod database but now I can do it all easy from the console. So I can only describe that as a big plus! Other than that a lot of more audio formats are supported plus ofcourse it is open source.

Now you are wondering why I even installed ipodlinux right and not just rockbox? Well Ipodlinux has some nice features that I also really really like. For example iBoy. It allows me to play gameboy games on my ipod. Now I realise that some games will be a lot harder than others to play on it but I can for example play Final Fantasy! Just playing RPG games on my IPOD! Hell yeah.

I was already using my ipod a lot but it seems I’ll be using it even more now