My 2 Cents:  This is for all you OLD SCHOOL iPod owners that still like how simple it used to be before the iPhone.  Seems that Rockbox has come up with a new firmware 3.0 for your device that should breath some new life into it.  This is a firmware upgrade so be careful to back-up all of your data before trying.

I have not  had a chance to test myself but will update when I got it working but from the looks of it, seems like a really nice face-lift from the dull old display.  It also includes the ability to play-back a lot more codec’s (extensions) that you might not have been able to play in the past…this pretty much separates your dependency to iTunes…MUSIC FOR EVERYONE :O)

Well it took three years, but Rockbox 3.0 has finally made it on the scene, with a major overhaul in the sound decoding department and support for several new players. This open source firmware replacement is chock full of tasty new features, including codec support for over 15 formats like FLAC and Ogg, 5-band parametric EQ, MPEG video, multilingual interface, Doom and a pile of other games, not to mention freedom from iTunes. Oh yeah, and it can talk to you via a spoken interface — which comes in handy for not driving off bridges and what not. iPod, iriver, Sansa, iAudio, Gigabeat and Archos models are all supported, though Archos didn’t get many of the major 3.0 improvements like expanded codecs.

[Via Ostatic; thanks Eric L]

Rockbox 3.0 firmware breathes the life back into your MP3 player – Engadget