Installer 2

From wikiPodLinux

A new installer is currently in development for Linux (WinPods only) and Windows (see here for Mac OS X). It will only work on some iPods. Check Project Status page to see if your iPod is supported; the "improved" revision of 5th Generation iPods, and presumably any iPod running an Apple Firmware newer than Sept. 12, 2006 (iTunes 7), will definitely not work. See Limitations. The installer is written using Qt (http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt).

The nightly builds are currently broken, thus the installer is unable to download and install the kernel. In the mean time, you can use either the networkless installer below or manually install the kernel.

The new installer was made possible by the rawpod library; it basically throws its own device system on top of the raw iPod device, so it can partition, format, read and write files to the ext2 partition, etc.

Download iPodLinux Installer			Windows  Installer 2.3 for Windows XP. Is screwed up, getting an 'unable to modify firmware' error.
	Linux Installer 2.2 for Linux (see below)		Mac OS X Installer for Mac OS X
See also: Installation Instructions.

Packages

The installer manages your installation as a set of "packages"; each one is just a tar.gz archive that gets extracted into the iPodLinux partition, but the installer remembers what packages are installed and what files they contain, so you can remove and upgrade packages easily. A package might be the userland, a podzilla, a pz2 module, iBoy, etc; pretty much anything that works on iPodLinux.

Packages are managed almost completely over the Internet. The installer starts by reading the package list at. It offers for selection any packages listed there, along with any listed in package lists referenced by the master one. Dependencies are handled automatically, along with packages that only support certain iPods.

Package maintainers and developers: if you want to get your package onto the master list so it is selectable by users of the installer, please leave a note on iPodLinux talk:Installation sources under the appropriate section. If you maintain multiple packages, you may make a package list yourself that will be referenced in the main one. Regardless, you must have a place to permanently host the files you want to offer.

Download

Platform	Architecture	Version	Link	Packages date	Networkless
Windows	x86	2.3w	zip	2007-01-07	netless zip
Linux	x86	2.2l	tar.gz	2006-07-09	netless tar.gz (ipodlinux-installer-2.2l-netless-20060709.tar.gz)
Linux	amd64	2.3lx	tar.gz (ipodlinux-installer-2.3lx.tar.gz)	2007-01-07	netless tar.gz (ipodlinux-installer-2.3lx-netless-20070107.tar.gz)

Note: Debian/Ubuntu users must install the libpng3 and libssl0.9.7 libraries (apt-get install libpng3 libssl0.9.7) before attempting to run the installer as it is not installed by default.

Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) users (and possibly those using < Ubuntu 6.06 or other linux distributions) should be aware that the usb controller may not be working correctly. If you are experiencing problems ejecting your ipod this installer (and any manual installation procedure) WILL NOT WORK. However, it is known that Edgy Eft (6.10) has a fully functioning usb controller (that ejects ipods correctly.)

Source code is available from our Subversion repository.

Testing

If you use the installer, and it works, or it fails and you know enough to be able to say what fails, please add a row to the table on this page.

ChangeLog

Version 2.3: January 7, 2007

• Bugfixes galore.
• Cache support; massive speedups.
• Command-line options for various automations.
• Partition handling expanded; might possibly be able to support MacPods in the future.
• Package selection system is rather more intuitive and "nicer".
• Robustness improvements. Package removals won't remove files owned by other packages.

Version 2.2: May 28, 2006

• Same as 2.2b2.

Version 2.2b2: May 18, 2006

• Fix a few relative path bugs with local installs.
• Support for networkless installs!
• Allow the saving of package lists and "which-packages-are-selected" info.
• Allow in-installer modification of package metadata (double-click on the package name).
• Running the installer with a package list as an argument will make it install using that package list instead of fetching the one on this site.
• Many bugfixes.

Version 2.2b1: May 14, 2006

• Cooperate better with existing iPodLinux installations.
• Don't save the retailos image as "aple" on Loader2 iPods. It caused a retailos freeze.
• Change the Loader2 kernel image name on the firmware partition to linx, not lnux, for compatibility with tempel's latest changes.
• Don't clip partition size to [0, 99] at first.

Version 2.1.1: April 26, 2006

• Don't redownload files if they haven't changed.
• Support loading package lists from disk.
• Default backup name changed to end with .fw
• Fixed a bug in make_fw2 that led to problems on 3Gs.
• Allocate globals in the main thread.
• Fix a rather debilitating bug in package downloading in 2.1.

Version 2.1: April 21, 2006

• Added an option to restore a backup even if something's messed up with the SysInfo file.
• Fixed rounding of the iPod's size.
• Miscellaneous code cleanups.
• Added categories to the package list format.
• Fix for a '/bin/podzilla not found' error
• Various other bugfixes against 2.0.

Version 2.0: April 8, 2006

• First working release.

Linux Self-extracting Archives

These packages are self-extracting archives which, when run, installs the installer2 binary to /opt/iPodLinux and also installs a kde/gnome/freedesktop .desktop file/icon for easy launching of the installer.

Linux x86 (32bit)

% gunzip /tmp/ipodlinux-installer-2.2l.run.gz
% chmod +x /tmp/ipodlinux-installer-2.2l.run
% /tmp/ipodlinux-installer-2.2l.run
% /opt/iPodLinux/installer     (or use the icon)

Linux amd64 (64bit)

% gunzip /tmp/ipodlinux-installer-2.2lx.run.gz
% chmod +x /tmp/ipodlinux-installer-2.2lx.run
% /tmp/ipodlinux-installer-2.2lx.run
% /opt/iPodLinux/installer     (or use the icon)

Source

svn co installer2.html

See the Building Installer page for instructions.

¹Requires: gcc>=3.4.2, qt>=4.0.1

²To make the installer run as root instead of the user that started the installer 'chmod u+s installer':

Limitations

With the updates that came on September 12, 2006 with iTunes 7 (and the newly revised 5th generation iPods and newly released 2nd generation iPod nanos), Installer2 is no longer able to detect the iPod's version. Because of this, Installer2 is unable to operate on these models/firmware versions at the moment (as of version 2.2). Please be patient and, if necessary, install iPodLinux manually.

There is a workaround for this problem, see correcting an invalid SysInfo file.

It's installed - what now?

See the Installation page.