all i'm gonna say is this, http://funroll-loops.org , Enjoy Zealots!

As nice as it is, the iPod is pretty much a one-trick pony.

This is why I love my iPod so much and probably why it's so successful.

That's why there are tools like apt, yum, or emerge, if you want to compile it yourself.

No one in their right mind would compile GNOME (or KDE or OpenOffice.org) from source tarballs unless you had a very specific reason for doing that.