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Linux Kernel Booting On the iPhone

Posted by Soulskill on from the there's-no-iphone-in-team dept.

mhm was one of many readers to note that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to the iPhone. "Planetbeing, one of the iPhone devteam members, has been working on porting Linux to the iPhone (along with a custom bootloader called OpeniBoot). Today they managed to boot the kernel! Video showing the boot process has been posted. Instructions and binaries are available on the project blog."

9 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Linux drivers? by naapo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder how they plan to get the hardware specifications for the necessary drivers from Apple. Booting Linux is not very useful, if you can't access most of the peculiar hardware in the iPhone.

    1. Re:Linux drivers? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful

      After a long enough period of time, yes, they will succeed. However, it is more likely than not that by the time they succeed, a new version will come out, and we will be back to square one.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    2. Re:Linux drivers? by cbrocious · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Once you've reverse-engineered a hardware interface, it's rarely difficult to reverse the next iteration. The basic functionality is usually the same, it's just a slightly different version. The bigger issues are jailbreaking the new device, getting to the point where you can replace the bootloader, etc.

      --
      Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
    3. Re:Linux drivers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      however Apple dislikes people actually using their hardware and therefore they try as hard as they can to break anything someone does to actually make Apple hardware do something useful

  2. Re:Why we ported Linux OS for iPhone? by harry666t · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What happened to "because it's fun"?

  3. Re:I understand desktops, but I am not a phone guy by hailukah · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Apparently some people can rub one off only so many times a day. Installing linux on everything around them is what they do between pr0n sessions.

    And yes I run linux, and so does my wife's computer. and my neighbor's. and my ...

    --
    "What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!" Doctorow
  4. Purpose? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And the purpose of it, is? To run a GTK or QTe UI on it? Wow!
    Linux is a great core, but unfortunately the UI bits are crap. Even the G1 UI looks like a turd compared to the iPhone.
    So as much as I like Linux on my boxes, I'll keep the OSX and the Apple UI on my iPhone. Thank you.

  5. Re:now my gmail acount is gona blow up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    can somebody translate this to english?

  6. Re:Jailbreaking is jailbreaking. by argent · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's NOT running Unix, it's running Apple's proprietary fork of BSD with no X support and a boatload of bizarre and arbitrary filesystem naming changes.

    None of that means "it's not UNIX". If you think the iPhone isn't running UNIX then some of the UNIX versions I've used over the past 30 years would explode your brain like a watermelon full of liquid nitrogen.

    I know the "in thing" these days is to suck Steve Jobs [...]

    If you think I suck Steve Jobs, tell that to all the Apple Fanbois who regularly mod me down for being insufficiently loyal to the Steve. Just because you don't like a UNIX implementation doesn't make it "not UNIX".

    Doofus.