Installing Linux on your iPod lets you record high-quality audio or play games, easily returning to the stock environment to listen to music, according to Macworld. iPod Linux is simple to install on all but the newest iPod models, and requires only 5MB of disk space.

The biggest advantage offered by iPod Linux, aside from the smiling boot-time face of Tux, is the capability to record monophonic 16-bit audio at sample rates up to 96kHz, a big step up in quality from the 8-bit, 8kHz quality limitation in Apple's iPod environment. Additionally, stereo recording is possible with a modified iPod dock, Macworld claims.

The Macworld article features an audio sample recorded on an iPod using the left earbud as a microphone, and the sound quality is actually limited more by an ever-so-slightly out-of-tune guitar than anything else.

Additional capabilities available in iPod Linux include:

• Black and white viewing of JPEG, GIF, and BMP files
• Standard uClinux games, including:
  • Pong
  • BlueCube (Tetris)
  • Steriods (Asteroids)
  • Nimesweeper (Minesweeper)
  • PodDraw (Etch-a-sketch with iPod scroll wheel)
• Extra goodies:
  • Calculator
  • Calendar (less functional than Apple's iPod calender)

Features under development include:

• iPod-to-iPod networking (beta testing)
• Game Boy emulator
• Doom

One limitation of iPod Linux is audio playback quality, which suffers from skips due to uClinux's lack of hard real-time determinism. However, switching back to Apple's iPod environment is easy enough, according to Macworld.

The Macworld article can be found here. An article describing how the iPod Linux project reverse-engineered the iPod boot loader by playing it as a sound file can be found here.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.