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*