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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!"
...although, as the announcement says, "Most things seem to be working but there are still some problems with IDE & the framebuffer."
Wired has an article on this, too.
The Army reading list
How do you use a command line interface on an ipod?
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Maybe apple really is an "open" company, they just didnt want anyone to know =)
Let me reiterate this for the last time.
On an MP3 player, the ability to run EMACS is not a feature. The lack of music-playing ability also seems like a pitfall.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I'll settle for Easter OGGs
May I suggest the Rio Karma?
Douglas P. Price
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).
Begun the "KDE looks better on iPod than Gnome" war has.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux (I manage an 80-node Linux Beowulf cluster at work) for the things that it's good it. But why would you take a working iPod and install Linux on it? It's not as if you get a discount on your iPod for running Linux. And it's not as if the Linux community has produced a wealth of iPod "killer apps." Straight out of the box, the iPod does what it's supposed to do. And until Linux has native support for some of the consumer technologies that make the iPod so cool (i.e., DirectX) what is the point of installing Linux on it? I realize that there's a certain "cool factor" involved with being able to run Linux on (insert consumer electronics device here), but at what point does one cross the line from usability over to zealotry? The fact that I can run Linux on my toaster isn't going to help me make bagels in the morning.
Why would one run linux on an ipod?
So that you can put an OGG player on there and not have to convert your OGGs whenever you wanna listen to them on the go.
The OGG player runs at 80% of normal speed. So when you play rave music it sounds like house music, when you play speed metal music it sounds like metal music but when you play pop music it still sounds like crap.
If only they could get the OGG player to play at 150% speed, then all music would be chipmunk music...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Even though many of you ask, "Why??" the news of a new OS for the iPod does present some interesting possibilities. iPods could be used as webservers (a webserver in the palm of your hand) or fileservers. Now that would be cool.
"I know kung-fu" -Neo, The Matrix
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.
Anybody know if he's claustrophobic? Such a little window, geez..
Next generation power for iPods.. Tux running on an exercise wheel?
Read; Write; Execute
I propose a theorum: It does not matter how expensive a device is, some nerd will castigate and cripple it for no readily explainable reason other than pure anarchic hubris.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Linux on an Ipod is basically pointless. Especially on this very device, which is what hip people buy in the first place (don't get me wrong, I have one). That doesn't mean people can't tweak with it, but it's not that useful, since the geek population using iPods is outnumbered by the common consumers.
On the other hand, what about making a file browser that allow you to go through the files you stored on your pod ? I usually store isos, books, games, and the like on my 30Gb, and I really would like to be able to rename, delete, transfer to my comp directly from the iPod...
Of course, I could move my ass, but I'm not a techie. My 2 cents.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
I thought the iPod didn't have to horsepower to decode vorbis. IIRC most mp3 players have an actual hardware chip that decodes the files, and i also remember a story on here a few months back about the first ogg vorbis decoder chip. Coming soon to cereal boxes near you...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
There's hope for real-time playback, not just 80%. See here, someone is working on it again, and others think the hardware is sufficient.
don't even read this, just mod me flamebait, but isn't playing sound (perferably music) the entire purpose of a mp3 player? What exactly did the Linux on iPod do before? Display a cute penguin and nothing else? Forgive me if I don't consider playing sound a milestone.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
But if you could get that Beethoven conducted by a robot illegally downloaded onto your Beowulf cluster of Linux iPods and played it back through your sake-soaked wooden speakers as Cowboy Neal dances like an insensitive clod, I believe this site would somehow slashdot itself.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
I guess Jobs was right in saying that Apple's competetiors don't "get it." The iPod Mini, for example, may seem like an absurdity to us /.ers because of its high price, low capacity, and low feature set. However, it was an instant bestseller, with so many preorders and subsequent purchases that supplies were exhausted in a matter of weeks. The truth is, the average person thinks differently from the average /.er.
I have had 2 of the lovely little Karmas die on me. RMA'ed the first one after an HD failure only to have it replaced almost a month later by one that skips while playing most of my songs and has repeatedly required formatting just to get it to shut down.
Once I RMA this sucker for the 3rd time I will sell it and pick up the iRiver iHP-120 20 gigs of OGG, WMA, MP3, WAV, plus a remote with LCD, FM radio tuner, and can record into WAV or MP3 in realtime from a built-in mic or stereo line-in. Pretty kickass. Sure the Karma is about $75 cheaper, but for a unit that WORKS, it's worth it.
Plus, the Karma only has a 90 day warrantee. The iRiver has a 1-year warrantee.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
For an example of what a replacement third party firmware can do for an audio player, check out RockBox. It turns the obsolete Archos Jukebox 6000 series models into machines capable of playing music much better than the stock firmware, and also capable of doing other stuff as well.
The bottom line: iPodLinux is a work in development. When it reaches production quality, it WILL have more features than the stock firmware, and will support more formats as well. (ogg, anyone?)
You missed the memo on playlists, right? Turns out that you can use them to create whole new methods of organizing your music... Neat, eh?
transmission_err
Then you could stream music from your computer or over the internet while wearing it around the house.
Back in my day, we had no fancy shmancy ipods to wear around the house. We just turned the volume on the stereo up.
According to the site Tremor (the integer only implemnetation of ogg/vorbis) currently decodes at approx. 80% of real-time on the iPod.
Why not fork?
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.
Seriously, with all of the real projects that need coders, this falls way off the map into the "There be Dragons" category.
You're right. Coders have an obligation to provide their skills free of charge to a project that "needs" it, rather than one they enjoy working on...
- - 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.
I have *very* good reason to believe the iPod hardware is sufficient to play MP3s at real-time. ;)
Random is the New Order.
Random is the New Order.
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!
User Tools
The full uClinux distribution contains many basic tools (including Busybox) already patched for use with uClinux.
MAD is a MP3 player that does not require a FPU.
Tremor is an OGG player that does not require a FPU.
SoX is an audio processing application capable of playing a variety of music formats (.WAV is probably the most interesting here).
Intel's IPP package and IPP MP3 Sample program. Intel's IPP is a highly optimised set of libraries that includes MP3 processing. The sample program seems to work fine under uClinux.
Here's a suggestion: use the software you criticize, before you criticize it.
iTunes' smart playlists are automatically synchronized with the iPod, and boast features that your "custom nested format" wouldn't ever dream of achieving.
You can have:
Normal, every-day playlists, with playback order sorted by name, artist, time, album, genre, last played, rating, or random.
Or, you can have DYNAMIC, automatically synced playlists that update themselves based on any combination or exclusion of the following criteria:
Album, artist, song BPM, bitrate, comment, compilation membership, composer, date added, modified, genre, grouping, kind, last played, my rating, play count, sample rate, size, song number, time, track number, year.
That's a few more options than your "separates songs by language, style, and year" now isn't it?
The grouping and contextual modifiers are the following: contains, does not contain, is, is not, starts with, ends with.
This is presented as an arbitrary number and combination of graphical pull-down menus, easy enough for a novice user to use, yet powerful enough for someone versed in a language like SQL to understand and exploit to its fullest capabilities. What iTunes is doing is abstracting the presentation of your songs from the storage, which is what an mp3 player SHOULD do. The filesystem isn't smart, it isn't dynamic, and it isn't flexible. If you don't agree with this, then you're in denial. The very existence of playlists is proof positive that the abstraction is appropriate.
Your "case" is a strawman argument. You made this wild scheme of organizing mp3s because your software had no decent way of organizing music and organizing your playlists. Now that you have this half-baked limp solution for organization, you don't realize that better functionality has been designed into other players from the beginning. You're in the dark, buddy. Step into the 21st century. You want to browse by folders? Browse the Library on disk and double click to play your selected mp3. You want it organized some other way? Use dynamic smart playlists.
As far as ID3 tags go, it's nobody's fault but your own that your mp3s don't have that information in them. Another strawman argument. All of my mp3s have up-to-date ID3 information, either from CDDB or me typing in the info when I import something. Just because huge amounts of pirated mp3s don't contain correct information isn't a valid argument against the use of a useful technology like ID3.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
As long as we're talking about the original poster here, the original poster said iTunes' functionality lacked the ability to do things HE wanted.
Except he was WRONG, it has the exact functionality he wanted, plus the functionality he said DIDN'T exist.
Does this make any sense to you at all? My god. To recap:
iTunes functionality includes his "custom" scheme of presentation, as well as MUCH MUCH more. He was complaining that iTunes' organizational functionality EXCLUDED the way he does things.
Of course you can dream up of some inefficient, inflexible custom bullshit solution and complain that your solution doesn't exist in commercial software. That's the very definition of a strawman argument, which is what I'm trying to expose here.
I'm not going to berate your old school ways of doing things (I wrote perl and bash scripts to parse and organize my mp3 library back in.. uhh, maybe 1998, but I've moved on from that morass of bullshit and settled down in the modern world now) but I _AM_ going to correct assumptions made that are totally wrong!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.