I bought my 4GB iPod Mini about 6 month ago and here are various things I hate about it.

1. The price.
   Value for money is simply off the scale. You can get a player with similar features for half the money.
2. The headphones.
   They are white… yuck.
   They are to big for my ears … so they hurt after a while.
   They sound horrible. They have a lot of power in the bass, but the heights are barely audible. This is ok for modern Techno/Drum’n'Base, but not for the music I listen to.
3. The clickwheel.
   It doesn’t work if temperatures are below 10C/50F (Read: winter).
   It doesn’t work above 30C/86F (Read: summer).
   Sometimes it just doesn’t work at all.
4. Playlists handling I - Navigation
   The “three clicks to every song”-myth. I have about 400 different artists on my iPod, so when I want to listen to Madonna,
   I have to CLICK (1) Menu, CLICK (2) Music, SCROLL (1) Artists, SCROLL (240), CLICK(3) Madonna, CLICK (4) All, CLICK(5) “Song”.
   Even if I count each revolution with the clickwheel as only on click, I still end up at around 20 “CLICKS”.
   My car radio (empeg MKII) has a user-definable playlist structure, including hierachical playlists. That makes it so much easier. With over 800 Artists I need only 8 “CLICKS” … worst case!
5. Playlist handling II - Podcasts
   Maybe I’m too stupid, but…
   When I want to listen to a podcast in my car all I do is to go to the podcasts menu entry/playlist and click play
   and it simply plays the oldest not fully played song/item and starts at the last position I listened to.
   With my iPod I have to remember where I left of.
6. Reencoding.
   Why oh why?
   When I load music from iTunes onto my iPod, I want to reencode them to 128Kb/s MP3.
   The 320Kbs is simply to big and not noticable with the poor headphones anyway,
   but stupid iTunes won’t let me do this
   You can only reencode to AAC … and that’s neither what I want, nor what I need.
7. Portability.
   Why do I have to decide if I want to use my iPod from MACOS or Windows ?
   I got a Mac at home and one at work, but when I’m on the road there are only windows systems.
   So what now ?
   Stupid.
   My car-radio works with macos, windows, linux … and everything else. At the same time!
8. The off switch.
   The what ?
   Exactly. Where is the freakin’ off switch ?
   Everytime I get out off an airplane an pull out my iPod I find the batteries empty, because someone/something touched the button and it was playing the whole time.
   Add an hardware switch and that problem is gone!
9. Firewire
   Need I say more ?
10. Last, but not least:
    The display.
    Too much (useless/uneeded) information, while the important info (e.g. title and artist) is written in 5 point font.
    I have really good eyesight, so I can read it from a foot away, but other displays - with the same size - are readable from 10 feet away.

Would I buy one again ?
I guess not…

I usually don’t like the “do this and get a free that”-schemes,
but this one actually seems to work.

At least I have a few friends, that got their free ipod.
And I really want the new 30 gig video version.

So please gimme a hand:
Get a free iPod … and help me get one, too.

Looks like ipodlinux now supports the mini.

I’m giving this a try now.

[DRAFT]

First:
Backup the whole thing!
Step 1:
Plug iPod into my G5

Step 2:
Find the Volume
mount|grep -i ipod
/dev/disk1s3 on /Volumes/Antis iPod (local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

So my iPod is disk1 which is the first SCSI device.

Step 3:
Backup the original OS
dd if=/dev/disk1s2 of=s2_os

Step 4:
Backup the Data

Hmmm … can’t backup /dev/disk1s3,
so we’ll backup the whole thing.
dd if=/dev/disk1 of=all
(This will take a while, so you might want to skip ahead and download all the needed stuff )

Second:
Install
Step 1:
Get all the needed files:
(techzone has nightlies in the download area,
but these are for Windos only)
Get the files from ipodlinux.org
Get the latest kernel.bin.gz and podzilla.gz

Get uclinux-2.4.24-ipod2.tar.gz (or later) from SourceForge
Unpack it
tar xzf uclinux-2.4.24-ipod2.tar.gz

Get the linux filesystem from SourceForge.
Do not unpack this!

Step 2:
Get the ipodloader from SourceForge.
With the mini you need the CVS version.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodlinux login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodlinux co -P tools/ipodloader
cd tools/ipodloader

make (this assumes you have the arm-toolchain installed!)

Step 3:
Extract the Apple firmware
bin/make_fw -o apple.bin -v -e 0 Backup/s2_os

Step 4:
Create new all-in-one firmware:
bin/make_fw -3 -o apple_linux.bin -i apple.bin -l 2005-08-17-kernel.bin ipodloader-src-0.3.2/loader.bin

The resulting apple_linux.bin should be around 5MB

Step 5:
Copy the new firmware/kernel to y our iPod.
(If you skipped ahead earlier -> make sure your backup is finished!)
dd if=apple_linux.bin of=/dev/disk1s2

Step 6:
Copy the kernel libraries
cp -r lib /Volumes/Antis\ iPod

Step 7:
Extract the linux filesystem tro the iPod
tar xzf ipod_fs_040403.tar.gz -C /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/

Step 8:
Copy podzilla onto iPod and make it executable
cp 2005-08-17-podzilla /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/sbin/podzilla
chmod +x /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/sbin/podzilla