Linux on iPod...

OK, so in case you guys haven't seen this yet, these guys have managed to get Linux running on an iPod.

So naturally, I thought... Now that it can run Linux, can it run the empeg software?

Anyways, I don't own an iPod, and I have no idea if this is feasible or desireable, but the idea popped into my head, so I thought I'd post it. At a minumum I think it would be a cool "just because" kind of a hack.

Well, it does run an ARM, so it's vaguely possible. You'd have to figure out how to get the empeg player software to write to a different screen, though.

Doesn't the player just write to /dev/display? Seems like it would just be a matter of making a kernel module to read /dev/display and write to the Ipod's display. You could then use ir translations to translate the ipod's buttons into Empeg buttons. As my CS prof would always say "it's trivial.." (of course it really wasn't).

it's trivial

Getting the screen right is indeed trivial -- it could all be done in a hypothetical Hipodjack, using merely a substantial amount of coding work. The real barriers to running an unmodified Empeg car-player binary on a Linux Ipod include the ucLinux-vs-Linux issue, power management, and the CPU performance -- the Ipod Linux guys say that even madplay doesn't run real time, which means they're getting about 1/6 the performance of a car-player out of it. Plus I'd be slightly surprised if our licence let you make copies for such a purpose.

Peter