Hey guys! As you probably know by now I got my hands on a super awesome iPod 2nd Gen (Yep, straight out of 2002). Check it out!

Do you see that? It’s Podzilla. Yep, I managed to compile my way to iPodLinux! And it worked… OK. As it turns out, probably to nobodies suprise the performance is subpar.
Ok so, iPodLinux. The star of the show of course is the 2.4.32 uClinux, compiled with a customized GCC 3.4.3 toolchain. Podzilla is the custom interface that was developed for iPodLinux. Podzilla “0” was created using MicroWindows (Nano-X), and Podzilla “2” was created using TTK. In my build of iPodLinux, I ended up using Podzilla 0, mostly because Podzilla 2 was a bit too slow. The next part of iPodLinux, atleast the way I set it up was mpd (music player daemon). mpd is a fairly popular Linux program that, as the name implies, is a daemon that plays music! This is where the problems start, though… the iPod 2nd gen is sadly too slow to run mpd with any reasonable quality audio files. I tried FLACs, MP3s, and ended up the only files that played were sub 128 kbps MP3, and at that barely. So yea, iPodLinux was a lot of fun to get working, trying to scrape up all files I needed from around the internet and finally seeing that kernel bootup was very satisfying.

Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ll be sure to post all the source code and compiled binaries soon(tm). I had to find all of it through the Wayback Machine, lots of searching, and sketchy websites!

Anyway, my iPod now runs RockBox, since it’s updated and much better at the whole playing music things. It handles FLAC, OGG, MP3, and more at high bitrates!

So yea, that’s pretty much it! I have an iPod. It’s actually nice too. I can use it as a nice distraction free way to listen to music when studying and whatnot.
The audio quality is a really good too, the Wolfson DAC and amplifier circuitry produces a very nice sound. 2002 iPod works great with modern electronic music! 😛

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