Rockbox

Rockbox is an open source embedded operating system for portable MP3 media players, including the iPod, iriver, Creative Zen, SanDisk Sansa, Toshiba Gigabeat, and Philips GoGear lines, among others. The project was founded in late 2001 to provide an open source alternative to the proprietary operating systems found on such MP3 players, given these low-power, low-cost devices have unique input (buttons, click wheel, touch screen, etc.) and output (black-and-white LCD, color LCD, no display, etc.) designs, and are not able to performantly run a more complete operating system such as Linux.

The project was co-founded by Björn Stenberg (zagor), Daniel Stenberg (bagder), and Linus Nielsen (LinusN) to support media players by Archos, a market leader prior to Apple's introduction to the market. Support for PortalPlayer-based iPods appeared in 2006.

Compatibility
Rockbox lists current device compatibility on its homepage, with further details on its Target Status page.

iPod
Rockbox provides support for the following iPods:


 * iPod 1st - 6th generation
 * iPod mini 1st - 2nd generation
 * iPod nano 1st - 2nd generation

Despite being internally similar to the iPod classic (6th generation), the iPod nano (3rd generation) is not supported. Likewise, despite sharing the S5L8720 SoC with the iPod touch (2nd generation), the iPod nano (4th generation) is also not supported.

Customization
Rockbox provides significant customization options, including themes, fonts, and numerous settings to control the operating system's behavior.

Several themes created by the community are displayed below.