okay, so i have acquired an old ipod classic g4 greyscale from my computer breaking cousins some of you may know about. the original firmware is fudgeed as is the battery, so its pretty  much useless as a portable music player. I've since installed rockbox and it sits on top of my hifi plugged into the mains as a jukebox so i don't have to keep taking cds in and out of their cases and getting them dirty.

rockbox removes the need to use the abomination that is iTunes to transfer music to the ipod; the ipod will simply show up as a removable drive and you can drag and drop pretty much any format  onto the hard drive and it will play.

so, the ipod is now more 1337 than when it left the factory (apart from the battery), but I'm still not happy. i want it to be even 1337er.

a few days ago i was reading an article in a magazine  (not hershey kisses) about how expensive flash based computer storage is, and about how you can just make your own using CF cards  and adapters. it talked about the troubles of getting XP to install onto a removable drive and how to get around  it (basically it said not to bother and install linux instead). this gave me an idea.

when i first got the ipod i didnt  expect much of it would still work, in fact i was surprised by how much still did. originally i only planned on using it as a portable hard drive. so here comes the big  question, the one that you've all been waiting for...

would it be poissible to have a super 1337 ipod that ran rockbox as its firmware AND also, when connected to a computer, could be used to boot linux? a bit like running linux from a pen drive, except this pen drive is big, white and heavy.

i had a go at it this morning but couldnt work out how  to arrange all the partitions. Rockbox needs a FAT32  partition from which to boot and for storage, and Kubuntu (my linux distro  of choice) needs its array  of partitions. my problem was working out how to  do all this in the Kubuntu installer.

if anyone can understand what I'm trying to do and knows how to go about doing it, help would be greatly appreciated. *cough* e-pigs *cough*

Hey, i read that article (assuming were thinking about the same one in micromart) about making Solid State drives for a fraction of the price

I would imagine its possible, the only issue would be convincing rockbox that it was the first partition even with grub in front of it

roberth Wrote:Hey, i read that article (assuming were thinking about the same one in micromart) about making Solid State drives for a fraction of the price

I would imagine its possible, the only issue would be convincing rockbox that it was the first partition even with grub in front of it

yeap. Micro Mart.

Senseito Sakura Wrote:I'd imagine it would be possible, easily.......... hmmmmmmm, you'd need a Live USB Distro, PuppyLinux, DamnSmallLinux, SLAX

Google Linux on USB Drive and just MAKE SURE you partition right,.

shall try. I've heard  that its easy to get Knoppix going  on a pen drive. its similar-ish to Kubuntu  so I'll probably try  Knoppix. its the partitioning that I'm having  trouble with. Basically I'm a linux noob (i have a tiny bit of experience) and know pretty much nothing about how to  manually partition a drive for linux to work on it.

metalgear08 Wrote:Hey, iTunes ain't that bad. On Mac. On Windows, it's a steaming pile of fail lol

I dunno, is it the bigger or smaller capacity iPod of that generation? Because the iPod file structure reads the firmware from a certain size partition, ie, 20GB or 40GB. You can't go 30GB. if you have the bigger capacity one, then just reflash an image of the HDD from the smaller capacity iPod, and install Linux on the remaining part of the drive.

Rockbox will  work no matter how big its partition is. there are articles on the internet about people who have retrofitted 300gb laptop hdd's to ipods running rockbox with no problems. Also its a 20gb ipod.

when you install rockbox it creates 3 partitions  on the hard drive. the first is a partition table about 8mb in size. the second is where rockbox stores its bootloader and the original ipod firmware should you ever want to go back to it. the third is where it keeps  its main firmware and stores everything (music and the like). its the third partition that you see when you plug it into the computer. this is the partition that i want to install linux onto if possible. i know that linux can boot from a FAT32 partition as well as pretty much any other filesystem other than NTFS (i think).

also about  itunes, yes on windows it is a steaming pile of fail. on a mac though, the only experience I've ever had of using a mac is at an internet cafe. itunes was  blocked from running so i couldnt try it. the computer did't have speakers anyway...