Pimp your iPod with iPod Linux

Santa gave my little sister a big, fat, video iPod for christmas – and she subsequently gave me her small, skinny, old iPod for free. Being the nerd that I am, I have known about the iPod Linux project for quite some time now – but never had a way to play with it. Last night I decided that this old 3G iPod needed an “upgrade”. It is extremely easy to load iPod linux on your iPod.

Here are the benefits you have with iPod Linux:

• Many many more games – such as TETRIS (er… I mean “bluecube”) on your iPod
• Stereo line-in recording at up to 96 kHz (requires either a dock or you to make a cable)
• Mono microphone recording through the headphone jack at up to 96 kHz
• Cool penguin startup image
• Still plays your music – and also plays additional formats
• You can say to your friends that you “hacked” your iPod, and stand out from the crowd.

Installing iPod linux from a Mac is incredibly easy. You just download an installer, connect your iPod – and let it have it’s way with it. It will first backup your original firmware – then it will patch it – and then it will reload it to your iPod. Your music is not lost when you upgrade it to iPod Linux. The other thing about upgrading to iPod linux is that you can specify which one you want to load by default. I have Apple’s loading by default right now (I wasn’t that brave) – so to boot into linux I simply hold down the “rewind” button to get it to load.

Check if your iPod is supported: Here. (I’ll save you the trouble by telling you that the last officially supported version of the iPod is the 3rd Generation – but that up through the new video iPods they have working versions ready but not officially supported yet. On the iPod nano project they are building a cool video player to give it some playback to rival the video ipod.)

Download the official Mac OS installer here
Download the Mac OS installer for iPod mini’s and 4G’s here
For other operating systems, check here

For more information about the iPod linux project, check out: ipodlinux.org