Now, i know im probably in the wrong spot of the world, but I was thinking the other day. I have a linux PDA which is a unix based OS stripped completly and put into working form on a small device. An iPod must be capable of this aswell.

so from a Mac, the iPod uses the HFS+ File system as does OS X.
and the iPod has a large enough hard-drive to be able to install OS X.

The only problem i could see with this not working, is user interface.

I figure if we could start stripping down an iPod version of OS X if anyone is really interested in this.


any suggestions?

Your BFF,
lostsoftware

lol no offense but this is a really stupid idea
here are the most obvious reasons:

wrong processor
not fast enough processor if you plan to emulate
no drivers
not enough ram
too small of a screen
no mouse or keyboard
no internet capability
and MUCH MUCH more

if you are looking into alternative OS's for the ipod though, check out ipodlinux

http://ipodlinux.org/

ima make it work damnit.

Fully concur.

The most retarded point is that the full source of OS X isn't out there to be recompiled for the processor.

You phail™

-neospy

there's just no sane possible way to get osx to run on an ipod. you would have to completely rewrite the entire an entire os, one who's source code isn't available. to me the default os is as close to osx as you can really put on a portable media player. if you want something other than that, ipod linux really is a good choice, follow AriX's advice.

Well....its not a stupid idea, but no, it wont work. And never will unless apple releases an iPod with at least a 800mhz processor in it and at least 256 mb or ram. Which, i dont know why you would need that power for a portable music player, but w/e.

to be fair, it might be possible to get darwin to work, if you're a REALLY good programmer, and that could possibly be considered a 'cut down version of OS X'.

however, there wouldn't be much point...

zune might be a bit better to hack wouldn't it
has wifi too
ppl have gotton mac system 6 or 7 on to the nintendo ds already

if you want to try something along those lines, how about osx on a 360? that would be freakin sweet! you have usb ports for keyboard/mouse, enough ram and processing power, and a disc drive. it just getting it to all work...

Win95 can run emulated on a PSP and RedHat on PS2, PS3 will support natively installed OS's Dont forget Win98 can go on XBOX with Qemu

if i could afford a 360 i'd love to try it, but being a student and having a crap cooking job doesn't pull in the money.

but im avaliable for donations hehehe

before i think about donating, i have to get mine fixed...
couple weeks ago mine went bad (M$ didn't soder the chips right) and now i have to pay to get it fixed.

if we could get it working though that would be awsome! 3 x 2.3 ghz chips! we could have a competing system with the mac pro for about $300. and if we could get the ram upgraded...now i'm just dreaming

actually... an article on digg.com that i read claimed that a person got os x to start on a 25 mhz processor.

http://digg.com/apple/Old_mac_collector_ge...68040_from_1993

i still don't think os x will ever happen on an ipod lol...

yeah, it was more of just wishful thinking. i think the new thing will be developing for the xbox 360. ill have to get one to test on and what not, but i think its more than plausible.

just gotta start on learning the processors of the xbox and developing for them.

got the xbox 360 yesterday, and started working on it.

hopefully dont void a warrenty or f*** anything up tooo bad.
<3 wish it luck.

if anyone saw the hack with the NES controller hookeed up to play doom on a n ipod, it might be possible to do the same with a keyboard/mouse? still, the source isnt available/millions of other problems
but keyboard would be interesting for a notes program on ipodlinux no?

Is iPhone not OS X on an ipod?

No.

Explain, according to apple.com "iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls" and it runs OS X

The iPhone is a combination device that has a different processor architecture than the iPod. Then you have to consider memory on the two devices. The iPhone probably has ~512MB onboard memory for the system while the iPod might have ~16-32MB.

EDIT: These are just assumptions and mean nothing in terms of specs.

Both of them use ARM.

More importantly, who knows if the current iPod isn't running OS X ?
Apple never made public the OS of the iPod (except for the first generation ones, which used Pixo)

Ok, a few things I would like to point out:

1. iPod OSX would be possible
2. iPod OSX would be really unusable on that small screen

It could be possible but it would really suck on that small screen and running applications on it would be useless because they would take endless time to load and the weak processor with very low memory would make the programs very slow to make simple operation. The iPod was made to play audio files not run a operating system that is on two dvds and runs on expensive computers.

Not possible, if i recall the arm chip doesnt even have mmx or sse

Now there is nothing saying that a BSD system wouldn't be able to run on the iPod. Right now it's just a matter of porting over quite a few changes for the proc and some various other things XD

And making it work with a scroll wheel...

Rotate 180º right to move the cursor up, 180º left to go down, and think really hard to make it move left or right

Sounds good, but not really feasible. It's prolly better for you to waste your time with hacking hardware that would eventually yield something useful. It's a novel idea, but I doubt everyone'll run to their iPods, erase everything, and try booting OSX in 25mins just to see it works. If it was me, I'd return its music functions 5mins after recording it working on video and bragging to my friends about it. The XBOX mod sounds like a better project to pursue, better to do it after warranty expires Much easier to code on similar hardware the OS runs on originally than to disassemble PPC/Intel code for use with ARM that has virtually no multimedia acceleration.

My 2cents.

wel instead of running osx on an ipod how bout the REAL osx on the iphone. wouldnt it be cool to use a REAL dock and REAL programs on your iphone? i mean its completely feasable seeing as the processor is right and the iphone has all the drivers in it. so theoretically we would be able to take the kexts or whatever ti uses. SO ... whos gunna crack it and let us make it a REAL OSXphone

the closest thing you are gonna get is an ipod touch. Witch is acually running BSD (darwin?) with a low memory UI. The ipod touch is not running full OSX so put that out of your mind right now.

The iPod touch has a 473 Mhz ARM CPU... It would still be hard as heck....

Other than the touch, why would want to? Even with the touch, you don't have to much room to do stuff on an os with it, even more when the screen is taken up by a touch keyboard.

Well, as an alternative, i'm running VNSea on my iPod Touch. Sure, its not actually OS X, but I can use my hackintosh fully from my touch.

IPhone's system is almost made up of web technology and they can't run Mac apps so they are not really mac but editied Darwin + web technology

The iPhone/iPod Touch does run a stripped down OS X...there, goal accomplished

It's MUCH easier to build a hackintosh and VNC that. Just hide the tower, and no keyboard mouse or screen. Just like a server. Ignore the hardware, but use at as you want. Dang. I might have to try that now!

I know iPods can run OS X.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...050401064920219
But they'd suck since iPods have like 32MB of ram (Well the G1).

I'm pretty sure that was a joke. Sorry about that.

An ipod could run a very stripped down version of OSX, however they do not (and with good reason)
as i recall, rockbox and ipodlinux were both horribly slow.
The ipod touch runs a heavily stripped down version of OSX over a half-functional ARM version of Darwin (which you could jailbreak and expand to a version with full BSD subsystem) and that is as close as we're going to get to running OSX on it.

The user interface is WAY too heavy to run on that little ARM processor.
It would be slow, it would stutter and eat up your battery in minutes.

I hope I don't get flammed by this comment, but would it be possible to install OSX on an ipod, but to use it as a bootable external hard drive? I have an old ipod that's replaced by my iPhone. It would be cool to bring this back out into the sunlight and make it used for something other than gathering dust.

If you wish to destroy your iPod, yes. Use GParted or some partitioning utility to completely wipe it and put one huge FAT32 partition on. Then in OSX's Disk Utility, change it to HFS+. I dunno, I never tried it, mostly because I value my iPod

I don't mind. My ipod is a 10gb I had for years. It's done its time.
But even so, how would this "destroy" it. Wouldn't all you have to do is resync it to itunes and all the stuff will be restored? or do you have to format it first. What is an ipod's native format?

Whenever I look at my iPod in GParted, it shows up as a completely blank disc, all as 'unallocated space' (as in no partitioning). So, my hypothesis is that creating new partitions will destroy it. Will it? I don't know. I'm too scared to do try it

Have you tried it on another computer first? I'd think that something should at least show disk space... maybe try to use file recovery software and see if it'll show anything on the drive, cause if you partition it over, I'm sure it'll screw it.

I got this working with my Mac. Worked great. Slow as hell, but great!