dual booting the ipod? okay.

alwaysBETA, a great site with all sorts of random articles (their button is on my blogroll) recently put up an article detailing the installation of rockbox, an alternative non-linux based os, to one’s ipod. It’s pretty involved, but as long as you follow the fairly straight-forward directions you should be fine. Basically, with rockbox, you add about 25 games, including Doom, Bejewled, Snood, PACMAN, Snake, Snake 2, Tetris, Asteroids, and a whole bunch of others; as well as support for OGG and FLAC files and a kick-ass list of user-creatable themes to replace that same old apple interface you’ve gotten bored with, many of which support a “next song” feature so you can peak ahead on your shuffle, for example. Unfortunately for some, this only works with ipods that are 4th gen or newer. I tried it on my ipod video (5g) and it worked like a charm. I’m still deciding on what theme to use, and there’s a crapload of functionality I need to wrap my head around before I can use it effectively, but it’s still pretty damn cool.

Basically, you have to install the iPodLinux Loader2 bootloader, then install Rockbox and set it up to automatically detect your mp3s via ID3 tags instead of via file system since Apple screws with the filenames on your iPod. Then you can install a theme, play a game, run a search, or one of literally hundreds of other available actions, all on your iPod. Here’s the link.