Thursday, February 23, 2006

Linux on your Ipod

For anyone who has read the Ipod manual, and some Mac Hacks, this next line you will already know. On the 'Ipod' (not nano/mini/shuffle) you can install mac os 10 (provided you have the dvd) with a watered down gui! Why escapes me and I have never had a big Ipod to experiment.

For others of you into this sort of thing, this won't surprise you: You can install Linux on the Ipod from http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page

Now, this isn't new news in reality but what I didn't realise until tonight was they haven't screwed around with the permanent ROM in the Ipod in order to get this to work, which I found surprising and it really does beg to question how long before we can walk around with ipod size devices that are the main unit of our PC minus the media drives and ports that we can just 'dock' at places and use shared peripherals such as keyboard, mouse and monitor and undocking just puts you pcpod into sleep mode? (which MacOSX users will know is far superior to the sleep functionality of Windows).

I personally reckon there would be a good market for this, maybe not massive and maybe not in public domain, but absolutely for major corporate customers. For example, over the summer I worked as a SAP admin/programmer for Cadbury Schweppes and there about 75%+ of the workstations were centrino laptops with desks cluttered with docking stations, keyboards, monitors and mice. This was done in order to enable all office staff to work anywhere on any Cadbury Schweppes site anywhere in the world (infect it went further than this, all employees that needed to be contactable (so basically everyone with a laptop) had a company mobile which about 70% of all calls were made to and from (I even saw the phone bill being delivered, lets just say it was delivered in boxes as envelopes were never going to be strong enough to hold that much paper) and the whole network was setup to be global in that I could access any server anywhere in the world and I could plug my laptop into any Ethernet port on any site anywhere and the dhcp there would give me instant access to the network without any modifications to my laptop). Anyway, back to the point, they could replace all those laptops with a device you can drop in your pocket, improving their security and component lifetime no end and for when you are on the road and need a 'laptop' then a carcass you just stick you pcpod into is going to be more cost effective than giving everyone a laptop because you would only need a tenth of the quantity of carcasses compared to having each one a full blown laptop

EDIT: Damn, just thought another cool HCI project...If this product gets invented mark my timestamp on this blog post, I'm claiming royalties!

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