Install Linux on iPod

[Solomon]

What is iPodLinux?

iPodLinux is an operative system based on the Linux kernel which is now in development, but it is now fully functional for first, second, and third generation iPods. It supports some ACC, MP3, and basic OggVorbis playback. It even includes some games. The downside of iPodLinux, at least according to certain reports, is that its OGG Vorbis display is not fully developed, it delays in booting up, and some features do not work well in certain iPods.

[Solomon]

iPodLinux is an open source venture into porting Linux onto the iPod. So far, a customized uClinux kernel is successfully ported to the iPod, and written a simple user interface for it dubbed podzilla. Additional applications and modules have been written, adding many capabilities not found in Apple's firmware. iPodLinux currently works on all iPod generations with the exception of the 2nd/3rd/4th generation iPod nano, 6th generation iPod classic, all iPod shuffles and the iPod Touch.

The new installer was made possible by the rawpod library; it basically throws its own device system on top of the raw iPod device, so it can partition, format, read and write files to the ext2 partition, etc.

Before you compile intaller 2, you will need (in short) a way to run makefiles, Subversion, Qt4, and gcc3.4.2 or later (gcc 4 is fine).

You can download this linux program to both install the required software to compile, compile, and run installer2 for linux.

Download

[Solomon]

Just download it as a text file and place it at the top of your home folder, go into a terminal and type:

% cd ~
% chmod +x ./Installer2Linux.txt
% ./

Open up the file "Installer2Linux.txt" in the window that just popped up and click on (if prompted) "Run In Terminal". Finally, just type in the root password and let the script run.

Packages :

The installer manages your installation as a set of "packages"; each one is just a tar.gz archive that gets extracted into the iPodLinux partition (in a particular folder), but the installer remembers what packages are installed and what files they contain, so you can remove and upgrade packages easily. A package might be the userland, a podzilla, a pz2 module, iBoy, etc; pretty much anything that works on iPodLinux.

Packages are managed almost completely over the Internet. The installer starts by reading the package list at iPodLinux:Installation sources. It offers for selection any packages listed there, along with any listed in package lists referenced by the master one. Dependencies are handled automatically, along with packages that only support certain iPods.