aka. Seshpenguin
title: Let’s revive iPodLinux! author: Seshan Ravikumar type: post date: 2019-01-01T21:27:57+00:00 url: /2019/01/01/lets-revive-ipodlinux/ categories:
Before I start, Just want to say: Happy New Year! It`s 2019, and we will surely continue to have way too much fun as usual. Anyway, on to your regularly scheduled blog post!
iPodLinux… some of you may have heard of it, some of you may have not. Either way, now you know about it, and you’re gonna love it!
I’ve recently gotten my hands on a 2nd gen classic iPod (straight out of 2002. It has a 10GB Hard Drive! Spinning platters are awesome), and as usual, I gotta run Linux on it! iPodLinux is a port of a special fork of Linux, uClinux (Microcontroller Linux), which is designed for CPUs without a MMU, like the iPod’s PortalPlayer ARM7 CPU.
Sadly though, the iPodLinux project has mostly been abandoned since ~2007/2008, and the latest stable kernel version is stuck on 2.4 (circa 2004)…
Don’t worry though, it’s Seshan to the rescue! I hope to pick up (read: maybe try to do some stuff with) iPodLinux. So far I have scraped the internet for the various kernel patches and whatnot, which was kind of hard (the iPodLinux website has been on and off for the past years, and the code has been scattered with it). My next goal is to compile the kernel, then move onto compiling the userland and Podzilla (the UI of iPodLinux).
You can view a read-only backup of the iPodLinux Wiki I have hosted. Do note that a lot of links are broken, and there are some sketchy stuff that’s made it in to the wiki over the years (Links to unrelated stuff, trackers, etc). I’ll do my best to remove them, but assuming I can get somewhere with this, I’ll make a new website.
That’s it for now, and I am very excited to listen to some music on old hardware running Linux!