[PLUG] have an old ipod sitting around?

[jen montserrat]

I was trying to imagine some fun things I could do with an old 10GB Ipod
classic that has been sitting around my place gathering dust so instead of
taking the ipodlinux route I decided to try something different and believe
it or not this old Ipod is now functioning as a USB based boot device for
Knoppix live (not an OS install).  So now I have an arsenal of ways to
impress my unsuspecting family members over the holidays.

Here is what I did.

First mounted the device (varies according to every system, which USB port
etc).  In my case the Ipod mounted as /dev/sdb1 -> /media/usb0.  So I umount
the device and then fdisk:

fdisk /dev/sdb
p
d 1
n
p
1
<series of enters>
t
6 (FAT 16)
a
1
p (make sure it looks right)
w

then mkfs on the device

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdb1

now mount the device

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb0

I tried for days to create a chroot usb boot OS using syslinux and grub and
because the systems the device was connecting to varied so much, I was
finally forced to dig up a tool that does all the work for you and I must
say it is a pretty decent app called "UNetbootin" at
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/.

Once you download the Linux binary, locate the file where you downloaded it
do and make it executable (chmod 700 unetbootin-linux-377) and then start
the app and you should get a minimal gui that allows you to choose what
build to install and to what device.  There are a couple of dependencies for
this application to work (mtools and p7zip-full).  Download the most recent
Knoppix .iso and then point the iso location in the app to the Knoppix .iso
recently downloaded.

Now simply connect up the Ipod to USB, reboot your system and choose to boot
from USB and wait for your friends to cheer you on with golf style applause.



~ Jen