[posthumanus]

okay: i’m fishing in the dark here but,

the scenario: i want to travel the pacific and take my computer & its capabilities with me, but want to fit it in my pocket. then i saw this:
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50688,00.html

and it got me thinking (i’ve never even seen an iPod so this is just wild speculation).

can i install my OS and software on an iPod?

can i plug it into any firewire computer and boot from it?

strikes me it would make the ultimate portable (you could even listen to music on it too).

posthumanus.

[ericwass]

Yes. Absolutely. That's part of its appeal. Though using an iPod as a boot disk will wear out the mechanism significantly faster than using it as an MP3 player. It also tends to get hot when doing continuous read/write cycles. This will wear other parts faster as well.

[posthumanus]

well i'll be damned. i thought i was just talking out my arse (had a few beers already and stumbled onto the above link).

so basically it's an external HD? when you plug one in and its icon appears on your desktop, you install your OS onto it and can go from there?

it should still last a year or so though? and draw power from whatever it was plugged into?

what exactly does 'continuous read/write cycles' mean? if i wanted to do any serious work i could always drag & drop to the mainbrain.

besides, i would only want to plug it in maybe once a week or so, for small time stuff.

[flysky]

You may alternatively want to consider this from MacOSXHints:

You are thinking about a useful argument to buy an iPod? Well, see it as some kind of notebook. Thanks to the power of OS X, you can carry your complete workspace from home in your hand.

Just copy your complete Users folder to the iPod. Now go to another computer running OS X and create a new user on this machine. Let’s name it ipod_user. When you have created the user, open NetInfo Manager, click the lock and enter your admin password, and scroll to the "Users" entry.

Here you'll find the newly created user "ipod_user". Edit the category "Home" by changing the actual homepath from /Users/ipod_user/ to /Volumes/ipod/Users/home_user. Replace "home_user" with your home user's short name, then save and log out. In the login panel you'll see the new user "ipod_user". Login and now this user will use all prefs etc. from your iPod. Everything from home now works on the hostmachine, including dock settings, mailaccounts, your iphoto library, everything. And it’s way smoother than booting from OS X on the ipod.

That’s personal computing at it’s best! thank you OS X!

If you go to that the page linked above and scroll down, you'll find more discussion of the issue. There may also be some discussion of it on their forums. That approach may not get you everything you want, but it sounds like less strain on the iPod.

[ericwass]

It probably won't overtax the iPod to keep a bunch of software on it, but when you use it as a boot disk, the host computer will keep accessing it for various system resources and memory caching (read/write cycles). This will keep the disk spinning pretty much continuously which isn't a problem for bigger, more robust drives, but will wear out the more delicate iPod mechanism fairly quickly. But, shoot, if you don't get a full year out of it, send it back to Apple. It should last at least that long.

[FXWizard]

Originally posted by ericwass:
<STRONG>It probably won't overtax the iPod to keep a bunch of software on it, but when you use it as a boot disk, the host computer will keep accessing it for various system resources and memory caching (read/write cycles). This will keep the disk spinning pretty much continuously which isn't a problem for bigger, more robust drives, but will wear out the more delicate iPod mechanism fairly quickly. But, shoot, if you don't get a full year out of it, send it back to Apple. It should last at least that long. </STRONG>

Unfortunately, the iPod only has a 90 day warranty...