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Linux for iPod Matures
elinenbe writes "The Linux on iPod Project has just crossed a milestone. Currently their firmware works on all ipod models other then the new mini. Sound plays and for many people it has more features then the original iPod firmware!"
Anyone know enough about the IPOD architecture to say if it would be possible to fix up this linux to play OGGs? All I want for xmas is a cool MP3 player that plays mp3s and oggs :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Where are you getting "for many it has more features than the original firmware" from?
;) How's about automount picking up on another iPod plugged into the firewire bus and mounting it fat32, access it's database, copy the files over and naming them logically based on either id3 tags or on the database, and then update the localhost database? >:)
Seems to me everything is very basic, unless you count the ability to browse by file a new feature, but the datbase accessibility of the original firmware is conspicuously missing.
Still...I like it. The iPod has a usb bus. A firewire bus. Throughput is an issue, but I imagine some hotplug devices will get support.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Because the reverse-engineering effort needed to make it happen will yield other fruits.
I'd like to know how to add a remote display and simple button-driven UI to an iPod, for instance. My old PC-based car MP3 player is too big and clunky to fit in my current daily driver, and I'd like to come up with a way to interface its LCD and track-selection buttons to an iPod, using a microcontroller to do the dirty work rather than a whole PC. I'm about to go surf their tech notes to see if they offer any clues, even though I have no intention of running Linux on the iPod (if I can help it).
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I would happily put linux on my iPod if it would record stereo tracks. I hear it is technically possible, but.........no one has anything other than those crap voice recorders (mono).
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
You're also paying a premium for hardware design. The sand-proof controls are a real win. I doubt it would be especially hard to implement the interface (although it was probably hard to design it the first time). As for why, you might want to play ogg files. I'm not entirely sure where the system is actually stored, but you might be able to take one of the minis, remove the hard drive (and sell it for more than the cost of the ipod), and put in a CF 802.11 card. Then you could stream music from your computer or over the internet while wearing it around the house.
Then don't comment. Really, who cares if YOU see no purpose in this. What, are you just trying to belittle the guy because you deem his work unworthy of your attention?
Sorry if that was harsh, but I'm sick of hearing people gripe about this EVERY TIME A STORY LIKE THIS APPEARS. Keep in mind that one of the primary reasons computers -- and I suppose a lot of technology -- exists as it does today was not because of some marketing suit at Microsoft or Apple thinking of what the next profit-generating product would be, but rather the tinkerings of curious individuals that seemed almost silly at the time.
It takes little intelligence to downplay someone's efforts, but it takes a good bit more to see where they may be going with it and the potential uses. And from what I've seen, people of the former persuasion are generally what I would consider straight up consumers, and that's just sad.
The fact that I can run Linux on my toaster isn't going to help me make bagels in the morning.
Yes, but if your bagles were $.99 a piece and you could enjoy independantly made bagles for much less, wouldn't you be glad to know you had the choice?
The sooner iPods can play higher quality ogg streams without the digital restrictions management is a "good thing". And the sooner the conversion process is streamlined for the average user to be able to de-DRM-ify their iPod, the better.
Perhaps the reason linux is ported to every hardware architechure is our undying desire to actually be able to do anything we like with the hardware we buy.
-Wes
It's not necessarily about being zealious or anything like that. It's just a hobby project for now. Some Linux coders got to gether and thought it might be fun to do just for the hell of it. Just something to tinker with. Then again that's how Linux itself started out so who knows. I think it really does have some potential once it matures a little.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Yeah. It's real great that Apple's willing to let me organize my music by Artist, Album, maybe Genre too.
F*ck 'em. I want folders.
I don't know how more clear to say it: When I get new music, I want it separated from my old music. I don't want to have to manage per-song playlists, and I certainly don't want to have to care about which single found its way into what Artist or Genre. The most insidious aspect of Apple's architecture (and that of the Rio Karma -- I had one of those too) is the degree to which it makes it so accursedly difficult to separate Singles and Albums, New and Old, Unfiltered and Validated, Fast Stuff and Slow. It's Apple's way or the highway.
Heh. Sort by purchase date, THEN tell me you've integrated iTunes well.
--Dan
The reason to have an alternative operating system for the iPod is to add new features! There are so many great things that can be done with the hardware in the iPod, that Apple is only beginning to scratch the surface of (or not even considering at all).
Not to mention adding features to the 1G and 2G iPods that are only available on the 3G firmware... I would run Linux on my 2G iPod if it provided functionality similar to the On-The-Go playlists on the newer iPods. Open-source firmware could even improve on these features, such as having the ability to name and save a playlist you've made away from your computer.
Finally, feature additions such as these might keep Apple on their toes - they couldn't let their own firmware become stale, because the alternative would always be improving. I think the Linux on iPod firmware is a great idea, and I wish the developers the best of luck.
I'm a typical slashdot type, hell, programming pays my bills, but i held out on buying an iPod UNTIL the mini came out.
Why? Because I walk everywhere I go, and the mini is small enough that it fits (when clipped into my jean pocket) above my pager and cell phone. Plus, it's just damn cool. And 4 days of music is more than i need on me at any one time.
- - How about using it to hold ISO's of your latest distro that you could use as a more direct form of data transfer
.....
Just to name a few ideasThis can be alot cooler than some of you are even starting to scratch the surface
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Has anyone heard of an effort to get Linux running on any of the iRiver series of MP3 players? I know they don't have as large of a hard drive (mine has 256 for storage, but they go up to 1GB I believe), but their firmware is just plain crappy. It might be interesting to see support for the FM Radio Tuner on it, too.
I'd be cool to see a small 65k color touch screen that could be put into this unit also. Then maybe a media player could play small videos from the hard drive as well.
I think the "Better features is a bust but the future holds promise"
iPod meshing would be cool to tie into your buddies iPod and access his files and maybe someone could make aftermarket jackets that would let the usb port power a 1xRTT or 802.11x card which could turn the iPod into a digital media device over a network.
With Linux the possibilities are endless!
Oh, and even Joe Satriani digs that Darkness tune.
Random is the New Order.
I'm not saying that it cannot be truly valuable to anyone. You seem to have use for it, that's good for you. I will give you, or anyone, "a break", for sure for sure. You need not reply if you feel authentic, I can't judge you from here. If you have no regard for the "signs" I describe, then you're obviously on the good side of my rant. And all of us are inauthentic to some extent of course: I, myself, don't feel like some sort symbolically-exuding philosopher-poet in that aspect, far from it, this is just kind of an area of interest for me, tis all.
I've heard some Satch(at least, I have Live in San Fran buried somewhere, I think I've heard more), but he's hardly a true artist is the musical sense. He's more a guitar acrobat. Perhaps he makes an art out of his acrobatics(or some music-acobatic hybrid), but I wouldn't say he makes much of an art out the music itself. There's a world of difference in relation to the art of the actual music between someone like Mr. Satriani and, say, Pere Ubu. I would stress the difference between musicianship and musicality. And I've never heard the Darkness, actually.
Generally I don't give a shit about desktop Linux because the UI is crap. I tend to think of Linux desktop users as people fighting against reality for idealogical reasons. However, when the UI is out of the picture it's great.
I use Linux on a server for FLAC/MP3 serving with Slimserver from slim devices. The UI in that case is a simple web interface, no command line required. It does the job it's supposed to do, and I don't much have to care what else it does. Windows in that situation would be too complicated and perhaps not capable of the very long uptimes my Linux box gets.
On the iPod, it's a lot like the Apple iPod UI - task oriented, simple functions that do one thing well - or at least it will be when it's polished. Which is fine, I don't much care if Apple patent or copyright or sue or whatever. As long as I get to have menu items like "Capture from CF" and "Record" without buying garbage like the Belkin accessories that enable those functions (the Belkin CF reader should NOT be sold. It is incomplete, useless with RAW images). To think that Linux is going to let me use my iPod in more useful ways is awesome.
It's the first Linux project I've ever thought I could be interested in contributing to. Well done guys! (and let's not forget the ucLinux people, who have been working for quite some time to get where they are.)
They're having troubles.
A lot of people are getting Hard Drive errors with their Karmas. I just got mine back from Warranty replacement (after a month-and-a-half wait and plenty of complaining). Mine broke after 2 weeks of use. Apparently, according to the folks at the Riovolution Forum a lot of people have had this problem (in the same time frame) and are currently going through Hell getting a replacement. I'm surprised I got mine so quickly.
Aside from that, I'm liking the Karma a lot. I just hope my replacement doesn't crap out the same as the first one did. If it does I'm aiming for an iPod.
Other than that, RMML (Rio Music Manager Lite) is a Java-based app that syncs up with the Karma over a dock that can be connected via ethernet. The coolness of this being that it's completely platform independent, and will run on any system that can run Java, including my fedora box. Its compatibility to be runnable on Linux is the main reason why I liked this. OGG and FLAC support are just extras. =)
Karma: Non-Heinous
This is flamebait, and I should mod it as such, but I think it'll make more of a difference if I explain why I would.
Who is going to go making playlists for every one of their folders and then update those playlists every time they add new folders? I see a problem here, one where the ipod playlists become a pain in the ass to keep up - why keep the same data in two places where they will surely fall out of sync without tedious manual synhronization?
I also use folders to make a custom nested format which separates songs by language, style, and year. You can't do that with playlists. A final plus for me is that browsing by folder avoids using ID3 tags, many of which aren't present on the the thousands of foreign language mp3s I have. The original ipod firmware lists a lot of songs as Unknown for me - I have to play them to figure out what the songs are - how useful is that?
The parent's response is similar to the many I saw on the ipodlounge forums. When people asked about browsing by folder, a bunch of apple zealots would shoot em down saying apple's way is better and that they should use it because it is easier. Well not in my case.
-----Some Ideas for the Ipod Linux
A neat thing that has been overlooked - wait till someone replaces the drive with a wireless CF card! We'll get an mp3 player that can be used anywhere around the house to stream music over the local network. We'll have to wait till the Linux firmware can actually play mp3s without skipping though, something the original article submission kinda implied could be done. It appears this is because they are relying on the processor to decode mp3s rather than whatever proprietary hardware mp3 decoder/encoder hardware is in there. Hopefully soon, if they do it at all, they will reverse engineer how to control the mp3 chip in there.
Another idea - what about streaming HDTV over the network and through through the firewire port? A TV with firewire port can do the decoding! Streaming mpeg2 to a firewire equipped HDTV wouldn't require the ipod to do any decoding, so it appears there should be enough procesing power to do this. It'd be nice to see an ipod docked next to the HDTV, and able to play video content from the PC. Didn't Netflix just announce downloadable rentals? Write a program that transcodes the rental into mpeg2 in real time and streams it through the IPOD onto a big TV screen. Pretty neat.
let me add some more.
:)
:)
* add SIDPLAY and MOD/XM support so that one can enjoy the full MOD galore without first going through the arduous task of converting them to AAC or MP#
* implement a pitch control with the wheel (so I can do some actual dj'ing on the device, or, rather, on 2 devices
what's more? there must be a lot more features I want to have. from file formats to fixing stupidities of the existing software
still running a x86? dinosaurs do exist!
Apple shut down the MP3 player for PDAs that had an iPod like interface, so won't they shut down this project now that it's copied (rather poorly) the iPod interface?
Two points:
:p
No, you can't make any bike sound like a Harley, unless you don't know what the Harley sound is. A big chunk of that sound is from the angle seperating the clinders, and the sound is copyrighted. You are breaking teh law if you ever sell that bike that you made to "sound like a harley", which probaly just means "loud" to the non-mechanic's ears (even a quiet Harley sounds like a Harley).
Regarding the "belt-drive" - well, if you like a harsh ride on your "comfy cruiser" then sure, go with a chain or shaft-based final drive. If you're concerned about making your cruiser more comfortable, *quieter*, or otherwise more livable, stick with Harley's lifetime warranteed carbon-fiber belt-based final drive. Then, go get a service manual and learn how to adjust it properly. I've got several friends who are Harley riders (and Harley mechanics, in some cases). They ride a *lot*. The final drive gives no problems.
Take a physics course some day. Note that the belt doesn't stretch and get hot, nor does it make any noise. Where's the "energy loss"? Now look at all of the pivot points in a chain. Then listen to the noise. *That* is power loss - power being converted to heat and noise. I don't know how many chains I've broken over the years on various chain-driven devices (several), but I've never broken a Harley drive belt...
Eh, good troll, though. Most Slashdot readers have no mechanical ability whatsoever.