i dont know if anyones made a thread about this yet so i will.

for those of you that have ipods and want more out of them, i came along a site that allowed use of a Linux-based OS on your ipod. It is pretty recent, and is really buggy, but its also very rewarding. If any of you guys are interested in coding or scripting for IpodLinux they're welcoming newcomers -

www.ipodlinux.org

some features of IpodLinux:
-better games
-the ability to port virtually any computer application to your ipod
-better games
-various other handy tools, like Wikipedia on your Ipod, and a notepad style word processor.
-better games
-other stuff
-better games

...okay so it might not be the most useful thing to happen to an ipod, but youve got to admin its cool.

some of the games include: Doom (all episodes), Snake, Bejeweled, iDeal or No Deal, chess, and plenty more.

Looks cool. Nice that people are able to write/download alternative software for their ipod.

I wish I didn't have a 4G iPod so I could use iPod Linux. Then again, I'm concerned about messing up my iPod's hard drive as well.

Sounds cool, but if it is as buggy as you say it is I might wait about a year for some hard development to occur.

I would use it, but the thing about it is, serial isn't supported on the 5G iPod yet. I assume that means it's unable to transfer anything over USB. Thus, I'm going to wait until more is supported until I try it.

IpodLinux isn't recent at all, it's been around for ages. I've tried it in two stints, once about a year ago and once very recently on my 4G Photo. Both times it worked well, most recently it had considerably more features but is very hard on resources and as such the music will skip and your battery lifespan, well don't bother. It's awesome to show off to your friends but if you want an alternate firmware that will play music and allows you to customise it, then go Rockbox.

People seem to think IpodLinux is recent because they are porting some pretty cool stuff to it at the moment, pozilla2 uses MPD and a native client to play the music, they are writing full blown bootloaders for it so you can run the native Apple firmware, IPL and Rockbox and pick from a menu at boot, stuff like bootsplash is being ported to it, TTF fonts blah blah. As I said, looks great but is at this stage, totally useless in a real world situation.

yea, your totally right.

im using a bootloader at the time as well, and am able to switch between the regular OS (which i use for music/vids), Rockbox (for Doom or most of the other games) and Linux(for PDA-style functionality).

Maritime: IpodLinux actually does support the 4G, so check it out if your interested. Dont worry about messing up your hard drive; if the installation does go wrong, you can always format it and run Apple's Firmware restore program.

Peter_89: Linux runs fine on my Ipod, so i think its safe.

microsoft/linux: the 5G ipod (which i have) is supported, and i have always been able to transfer files to my ipod over USB. If it doesnt work for you, try going in your itunes preferences and enabling disk usage.

I would defninently say battery usage is a problem, and installlation is'nt exactly the easiest thing either. the first 2 times i tried i ended up pulling my hair out and crying myself to sleep, but now that the 5G is more supported, i've been able to figure it out...mostly.

I found Rockbox much better for my video. It doesent take such a long time to load, and has better support for audio codecs. I just wish they would implement video. Both IpodLinux and Rockbox fail to support video on the ipod 5g's. So I have to use the apple firmware for vids

has anyone used the Installer2 on their iPod? I tried to use it and it gave me an I/O error. So currently all I've got is the apple firmware, and I'm hesitant to try again. I was wondering how anyone else got theirs working...

For Ipodlinux I wussed out, I used the Windows installer from a Win2k machine and then updated it from my linux machine (the Windows installer is pretty outdated).

do you think the windows version of installer2 would work better?

No idea, never used it.

the installers on the site only support the older ipods. for the newer 5g ipods, you have to do it manually. check the forums, theres bound to be an installation thread somewhere.

For some reason, the windows version of Installer2 worked on my 5G ipod. IPL seems pretty cool, although useless at the moment, it didn't have an option to play music. Granted, I didn't have any music on there, but even still

podzilla2 uses MPD to play music so unless you installed it (none of the tarballs used in a manual install include it) it wouldn't play music no.