USB booting :: DSL works well on ipod shuffle

I had been curious if this would work since reading this topic: http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....144&st=

So i borrowed a(n unsuspecting) friends ipod shuffle. I coppied the Ipod_Control folder from the shuffle to my windows computer to use later. I then did a usb HDD install from a dsl 2.2b live cd and checked to make sure the shuffle booted correctly. After that, I took the shuffle back to the windows computer and coppied the Ipod_Control folder back to the (FAT16) shuffle.

To my suprise, it still played music!

All the functions worked as they did before. The shuffle worked with itunes (6.0.4.2) and still booted with the "enable disk use" option ticked or unticked.

Observations:

Itunes prompted me to update the shuffle firmware to v1.3, I declined. All I know about the firmware on the ipod is that it is pre-1.3

When running linux I cannot play any music on the shuffle with xmms. I get an error about my soundcard. However i get the same error when trying to play music from a different flash drive (i don't have any music on my hard drive) so i don't know if it related to the shuffle.

And I tried, but the shuffle will not play music out of the analog jack when plugged into a computer.

I'll look into getting music from the shuffle to play under linux. Other than that the ipod shuffle seems like a great gadget to carry DSL around and listen to a few tunes on the way.

original here.