A long time ago I had come across a project that involved porting Linux on the iPod called iPodLinux (read more at the link). It basically adds additional functionality than that of regular iPods such as the use of third party apps such as gameboy and NES emulators. Seeing that I like to mess with these things, I decided to try it out. According to their website,
iPodLinux currently works on all iPod generations with the exception of the 2nd/3rd/4th generation iPod nano, 6th generation iPod classic, all iPod shuffles and the iPod Touch. Donations always help when it comes to supporting new hardware. Progress can be tracked on the Project Status.
The installation of iPodLinux is somewhat tedious. They recommend that you download the source code and compile them yourself (instructions on the site), which is what I’m doing right now. Compiling the source code requires a program called Qt. I downloaded the Qt4 + MinGW installer to compile the code. However, when trying to compile the code using “qmake”, Windows did not let me run the program.
Apparently the source of the problem is that my environment variables were not set properly.
The environment variables settings page can be found in Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables. Click the New… button.
Here are the required environment variables:
Variable Name: PATH (should exist already)
Variable Value: C:\MinGW\bin and C:\Qt4.x.x\bin
Variable Name: QTDIRC:\Qt4.x.x (whatever your version is)
Variable Name: QMAKESPEC
Variable Value: win32-g++