Some iPod news today. Firstly the iPodLinux group got video with sound working. Even includes a converter for those of us sad people stuck with greyscale screens. I still don’t trust myself to install linux on my iPod. If I ever upgrade though I’m pretty sure my old one will get it installed.
Secondly is that someone got SLAX, a small liveCD that can be booted off a USB drive, working on a iPod nano. He posted a detailed tutorial on it. What I like about this is that the iPod is still usable on it’s own, you just happen to have a bootable OS on it.
My current iPod only has Firewire (generation 2) which the library computers don’t have. I have installed OSX on it before and booted to it on the library G5’s but I have a PC in my office. I like the idea of one day being able to carry everything around with me in my pocket. It only a matter of time before someone has it so you can boot into linux where the data in encrypted on the iPod. I could then have a thin client and home and work and just boot the same OS at both places. Since the iPod can be mounted as a disk I can also access my files from computers I can’t boot too depending on whether I encrypt or not. I use linux on my work computer so it wouldn’t be much of a change. Not that information on how to get it bootable I could really use any distro.
I already use my iPod as a portable harddrive. I think I might be using it as a portable OS in the future.