Linky

The hardest part was opening that sucker. I borrowed a co-worker’s iPod opening tool (I think he got it from iFixit.) It’s just a hard plastic thing with a sharpish end. I’ve heard of people using guitar picks.

After about half an hour, I got it open. It took me so long because I didn’t understand how it was put together, now I can open it in a minute. The trick is to press the edge of the tool in at an angle, see the diagram below (where the grey is the plastic part of the case, the blue is the metal, the red is the iPod opening tool/guitar pick/sharp plastic.

See my photo below for another view of the tabs (for all photos, click it to enlarge).

Once I got all the tabs, it was pretty easy to gently seperate the two halves.

There is a small ribbon cable connecting the halves. I unplugged the connection and set asside the metal case half.

See that thing with the blue foam bumpers? That’s the disk drive. Tiny huh?

It’s got a ribbon cable connecting the disk drive to the board, I removed the ribbon cable from the end of the disk drive.

With the parts all separated, I used a can of compressed air to blow out the dust (there was a some dust inside). I reconnected everything, being very careful that connections were tight. Snapped the case back together. Powered the sucker on and it booted up just fine, and has been working fine ever since. I’m not saying that you can fix your iPod this easily– but this was my experience.

So. Tracie Rules had a similar problem, not exactly the same though. Her iPod wouldn’t boot at all wouldn’t even try. She said the before, it would lock up when she would try to play certain songs (that makes me think disk error). Eventually the pod just stopped doing anything. Wouldn’t power up, nothing. Me feeling like Mr. iPod-Fixer-Man says sure let me see what I can do. So I do the above steps, and Lo! Tracie Rules’ iPod boots. Cool. Cool, but those songs that previously caused it to lock up still caused it to lock up. So, I suggested, zero-out the iPod disk from your Mac, then reformat and reload the iPod. (I’ve no idea how to do this on a Mac) This is in the hopes that this procedure will find and mark for dis-use any bad sectors on the iPod disk. She did this (or rather delegated the task to her husband), and Lo! Part II, it works without crashing.

So with these two events, the iPod hardware is a little less of a black box to me.

Now for Kim’s side of the story, which I haven’t even read yet (she told me not to until I wrote mine). I say in my defense that mine is only supposed to be a techie how-to.

• What can I say about Linux on your iPod? Not much, because I don’t delve too deeply. But I do like the ability to run lots of mini-applications, including games, on my iPod. I never did get iDoom going though. Pure geekiness, but not for me as I missed the usability of Apple’s UI. Download iPodLinux here. Don’t worry, you can switch back and forth between iPodLinux and Apple, just restart the iPod.
• Rockbox is a little more usable but doesn’t have nearly as many apps as iPodLinux. What I like most about Rockbox is the ability to customize audio playback screen with your own format and graphics through WPS (b&w, color). Download from the Rockbox site or this alternate installer for Windows, Rockbox Installer X. Just like with iPodLinux, you can switch between Rockbox and Apple just by restarting the iPod.

Running these was fun, but day to day, I use the Apple firmware. Do I loose my geek cred? I dunno. There are so many little things that the Apple firmware does so effectively, it’s hard to give up, even if I can’t customize it as much as I’d like. Although maybe I’ll wanna Make something….

What is it? According to Ubuntu: Ubuntu offers you a complete Linux-based operating system, including all the major applications you need to play and work. With a strong focus on a desktop that Just Works, Ubuntu is a great choice for home or the office. The base system and all included software is free, and support is available from the community or by professional support providers.

By free, they mean free forever. It comes with OpenOffice and Firefox preinstalled. It was so easy to install. Easier then any version of Microsoft Windows. You can try it without even installing it, just boot from the CD and it runs a “live” version of Ubuntu.

Download the CD image here, or request a free CD here.

Installing additional (free) software is very easy, Ubuntu comes with “Add/Remove Applications” where you can just put a checkbox next to the programs you want (divided up into categories like “Games,” “Graphics, “Educational,” etc), and they are downloaded and installed automatically. Nice.

The whole Ubuntu user “experience” is smooth and logical.

Once you have it installed, check out this page for additional software Essentials.

UPDATE (Feb 24, 2007): If you are using parental control software (Cybersitter for example) see rick752’s comment below, he says that Cybersitter (and maybe others) corrupt Adblock Plus filters, and suggests whitelisting adblockplus.org in the parental control software, see his comment for details.