Recently we’ve seen progress by the linux4nano guys in their quest to get custom code to run on an Ipod Nano 2nd generation. They’ve apparently managed to extract the bootrom off a 2nd gen ipod nano (my copy of their extracted data is here – a reminder on objdump usage: “arm-elf-objdump -D --target binary -marm [file]“). I believe their intent is to port Linux to the newer ipods. Possibly ipodlinux. They do mention providing the necessary info to Rockbox and yes we will welcome it.

A large crowd of Rockbox hackers have joined their IRC channel and have been hanging out with them and helped out discussing ideas and pushed them towards publishing their news and infos on how this all is accomplished etc. Their SVN repo hosts some (most?) of the tools made so far.

The Rockbox wiki page for nano2g has been updated and hopefully it will keep track of what happens.

There have been speculations, but I don’t yet know based on what facts, that this recent news and hacks will be usable on other recent (encrypted) ipod models.

Summary: very interesting progress has been made. Lots of it is still left to figure out. There seems to be a bunch of skilled people around and now we’re seeing information and documentation for this getting published so I can’t but to hope for a bright future!