Ever since Apple released the iPod more than a year ago, fans have wanted the portable music player to do more than just play digital music. The long wish list of features includes using it as a universal remote and as a portable hard drive to store digital photos or movies when a camera's memory card fills up. However, there's been no way to do these things. Although the iPod has the hardware necessary -- it's built like a PDA with a whopping hard drive -- the software is a closed system, with no documentation or tools to help developers turn it into something else. That is, until now. After four months of stout effort, programmer Bernard Leach has managed to get Linux running on his iPod. Although still in the early stages, this development may allow hackers to bypass Apple's closed operating system on the iPod by using Linux, an open and freely available operating system, instead. http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,57565,00.html