Nokia N900 Linux Smartphone Running OS X

Rovaani writes "There is a video floating around of a Nokia N900 smartphone running the full desktop Mac OS X 10.3. From the author, Tomi Nikkanen: 'I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone ever to run a full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the "About my Mac..." window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is.'"

Comments

Useless commentary

[saleenS281]

What's with the "uselessly slow" commentary. The guy did it just to prove it could be done, which is pretty cool. I don't think he ever made any assertion that it would be a usable OS alternative for the N900...

Re:Useless commentary

[TheRaven64]

OS X 10.3 was PowerPC-only. The N900 has an ARM CPU. The 'uselessly slow' commentary comes from the fact that it's running in an emulator (QEMU? I didn't RTFA), so it's not like the phone is running the OS, the phone is running the emulator and the emulator is running the OS. Remember the people running PowerPC OS X emulated on P3/P4 CPUs before the first Intel release? It's going to be even slower than that.

Re:Useless commentary

[uhoreg]

The "uselessly slow" commentary is straight from the blog of the guy who did it. http://www.tuug.fi/~toni/serendipity/index.php?/archives/13-Mac-OS-X-10.3-running-on-the-N900!.html

Re:Useless commentary

[Cederic]

Whoa - where?

I want an Android VM for Maemo, hooked into the phone hardware. Then it's the best phone on the market bar none.

As it is, it's the best phone on the market except for the application support; I'm still hoping that comes good.

Re:Useless commentary

[pushing-robot]

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks

Old meme is old.

Not useless

[Renegade Lisp]

Maybe uselessly slow, yes, but this is the kind of tinkering that any device should allow if it is to be called a computer.

There's a direct link to a free information society from these kinds of experiments -- something that is very much endangered by the current trend towards unmodifiable devices and appifization.

Re:Not useless

[Haxzaw]

Nobody cares about licensing restrictions.

Re:Not useless

[Verdatum]

It's not a computer unless you can use it in a car simile.

Somewhat ironic

[Soulfarmer]

I find it somewhat ironic that iPhone's competitor can run Apple's OS and iPhone/iPad most probably will never be able to run Mac OS.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[TheRaven64]

It's running it in an emulator. Apple won't allow emulators in the store, but if you had a dev kit and ported QEMU to the iPhone it would run OS X too. It would, of course, be equally useless.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[fredmosby]

The iPhone and iPad run the multi-touch version of OSX. Calling it the 'iPhone OS' is poor marketing on Apple's part, but it really is full OSX with a different (better in terms of usability) interface.

So where is BeOS?

[rimcrazy]

Come on, if your going to do worthless things why not go for the whole enchilada?

Re:Surprised at the time required

[the linux geek]

Do you not see the difference between Mac OS running under emulation and Mac OS running natively?

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the processor architecture is also being emulated (notice the "pearpc" bit at the top of the screen).

OsX native to the Arm architecture would probably be an order of magnitude or more faster.

O_o

[SixDimensionalArray]

Now if I could just get Windows Vista booting on my TI-82!

Re:Surprised at the time required

[larry bagina]

That ghetto netbook probably isn't an ARM processor emulating a PowerPC.

Love It

[LearnToSpell]

I hate to sound like the eternal nuthugger, but I'm having so much fun with my N900. Just threw on the cifs-mounting stuff, and that combined (alternated, really) with sshfs means I can take my entire music collection wherever I go. 1.5TB, ripped to flac on a server in my basement, so why would I want to have to choose what albums I take with me to the gym or work or wherever? Just mount the thing and play. Plus, there's an FM transmitter built-in, so I can just plunk it down next to (~15 feet) a radio, and fire it up.

The "it's so slow" comments are kind of silly. This is obviously a POC, and a pretty nice one. Any phone that can run Asterisk, Apache, nmap and OSX is cool in my book. :)

Re:Love It

[shutdown -p now]

Nokia pissed me off to no end with the N900. I was waiting for the thing, postponing any phone related purchases .... and when it comes out it turns out that it does not support the 3G system offered in Canada by Rogers (and apparently also by AT&T in the US). EDGE only.

Nokia is a European company, so they use European UMTS frequency bands (which, by the way, also happen to be used in most of the world). Blame North America for trying to be different there, not Nokia for going for the largest worldwide coverage.

In USA, you still have the option of T-Mobile, anyway.

Re:Love It

[roju]

I've read that WIND uses the right frequencies to use the N900 at 3G speeds. Apparently they may even be bringing it to Canada officially. People are running it right now though, just self-imported from the States.

Re:Love It

[Verdatum]

Should we blame Nokia? Should we blame the telcos? Or should we blame the standards organization, ISO? NO! Blame Canada! Blame Canada! (and so on)

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Actually the "blame" for the different band allocation lies with history. Many frequencies were allocated to different services in Europe and North America, some of these services having not existed in one place or another. When the advent of cellular phones came about, the companies got what was available at the moment. The European HDSPA (aka 3G) bands were used by different things in the USA and Canada and so different bands were allocated. This of course keeps changing as some older services become obsolete and some new bands become available for other uses.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[oronet commander]

OsX native to the Arm architecture would probably be an order of magnitude or more faster Just wonder, only 12 minutes to "About this Mac"... sweet!

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[mister_playboy]

Your iPhone doesn't run OS X.

So where is z/OS . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . now get *that* running on your Nokia N900 . . . I see your enchilada and raise you a chimichanga . . .

Somewhat unrelated, but

[nightfire-unique]

Though this isn't directly related to running OSX on the n900, I just wanted to add that.. I'm not surprised.

A while back I posted a story that was rejected, asking if any fellow /.'ers had any experience with the n900 from a Unix admin's perspective. To me it seemed like a dream-come-true device: high-res screen, fast CPU, lots of ram... and most importantly, running Debian.

I had to find out, so I bought one about 3 weeks ago. It really, truly is a dream-come-true device.

I swear I'm not affiliated with Nokia in any way; I'm a Unix admin for a largish web firm. But if anyone else is wondering, yes it runs a Debian-derived OS. Yes, you can SSH into it as root, over 3G/GPRS, even if the phone is "off." Yes, crond works. Yes it runs native X11 and you can run your X11 apps (ie. directory manager, xterms, vncviewer, pidgin, openoffice/koffice, etc). Yes it's stable. The keyboard is usable, the UI is quick, and task switching is a breeze. The filesystem layout is mostly sensible, and you can apt-get dist-upgrade to get updates directly from Nokia (and other repositories)!

That blew me away when I first saw it so let me say it again: Nokia is using apt to send updates OTA to the phone! Proper version tagging and dependency management, on a phone!

It doesn't suspend like the crappy Zaurus did... when you hit the power switch, it shuts off the screen and (I believe) encourages the processor to drop to a very slow cycle rate (unless something heavy is running). So your apps continue to run. Battery life is ~16-24h with a constant GSM data/wifi connection, so you must charge every night. But it's so worth it.

Everything about it is done the way this 15-year Linux/Solaris admin thinks it should be done.

So, back (slightly) on-topic.. it doesn't surprise me in the least that they got OSX to boot under an emulator. The n900 is quite literally a pocket Debian workstation that happens to have a GSM radio onboard.

It doesn't run OSX.

[Rufty]

It barely even crawls OSX. (Cool hack, though.)

complain to Congress

[pydev]

That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval. And the reason for that mess is because the FCC and Congress have failed to set standards for mobile telecommunications.

That's one of the many reasons the US mobile market is so terribly backwards and overpriced: there is no competition, and monopolies are enforced through technology.

Re:complain to Congress

[Miamicanes]

> Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval.

Not quote. There's no technical reason why a single phone approved by the FCC couldn't be used on both Sprint and Verizon, or on AT&T and T-Mobile... it's mainly the carriers' fault.

Basically, the FCC requires any phone with unique hardware and radio firmware to be tested & approved. Sprint won't allow its customers to use Verizon-branded phones, and Verizon won't sell phones that aren't built to be "Uniquely Verizon". Thus, it would almost be beyond pointless for a manufacturer to pay to get FCC approval for a generic CDMA phone, because Sprint wouldn't allow it to be used, and Verizon wouldn't buy a million of them to resell to its customers.

The AT&T/T-Mobile situation is a little blurrier. It appears that right now, AT&T has a company policy of refusing to sell phones capable of 1700/2100 UMTS, and T-Mobile has a company policy of refusing to sell phones capable of 850MHz UMTS. Neither company will actually stop a customer from buying one himself and sticking the SIM card into it, but the market (right now) for unsubsidized handsets in the US is somewhere between "barely relevant" and "all but nonexistent". As a practical matter, there are exactly two American customers that manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola care about: AT&T and T-Mobile.

Need more proof of corporate policy dictating handset frequency availability? Watch the FCC submissions logs. I can almost guarantee that there will be two distinct versions of the iPhone 4 submitted to the FCC -- one that does 850MHz and 1900/2100 UMTS, and one that does 1700/2100 and 1900/2100. What's really sad is that they'll both probably have the same hardware, and differ only in their radio firmware. It'll suck for everyone... Europeans will have to decide whether they'd rather roam on AT&T or T-Mobile when they visit the US, and American iPhones will effectively be locked to AT&T or T-Mobile -- at least, for anyone buying one to use in the US with 3G data.

Re:complain to Congress

[pydev]

Sprint won't allow its customers to use Verizon-branded phones, and Verizon won't sell phones that aren't built to be "Uniquely Verizon"

Yes, and Congress and the FCC could require all phones to use the same standard and frequencies.

Need more proof of corporate policy dictating handset frequency availability?

I don't need any proof at all. I'm saying Congress should grow some balls and put an end to this madness by law.

Re:complain to Congress

[Miamicanes]

Well, there's one problem with REQUIRING both 850 and 1700/2100 -- it costs more to make a phone capable of doing both. From what I've read, at worst, the only difference between a phone built for 1700/2100 and a phone built for 1900/2100 is a few passive component values determined at build time. At best, it's purely a matter of firmware and regulatory approval. On the other hand, a phone that does BOTH 850MHz *and* 1700&|1900/2100 needs two radio subsystems.

Going purely by engineering cost-benefit and completely disregarding matters of politics, the most sensible compromise would probably be for the FCC to require that any phone capable of 1900/2100UMTS *also* be capable of 1700/2100UMTS. As a practical matter, it would affect mainly AT&T and Apple. AT&T, because international compatibility is one of their selling points, so most of their phones support 850 and 1900/2100. Apple, because their phones have to work with AT&T and also work outside the US.

To keep things fair for AT&T, the FCC could try to come up with some rule that basically says, "If you make a phone that does 850MHz plus 1700/1900/2100, then turn around and try to disable the 850MHz via software or the omission of literally a few cents worth of passive components, it won't be approved". The problem is defining it in a way that would prevent a company like HTC from trivially disabling 850MHz support just to pacify T-Mobile, but wouldn't require that 850Mhz support be added to a handset that otherwise has no reason to support it. It's kind of like defining porn... any halfwit can look at something blatant, like a circuit board with missing components and a chipset spec'ed to do 850 and realize that something's rotten in Denmark, but it becomes a serious judgment call if eliminating those components genuinely enables some kind of improvement.

As for Sprint-vs-Verizon, THEIR forced incompatibility is just stupid. All the FCC would need to do in THAT case is prohibit Sprint from refusing to activate non-Sprint phones, and require both Sprint and Verizon to support phones with R-UIM cards. It wouldn't even have to go so far as to require that Sprint & Verizon sell phones that use R-UIM cards... just require that they allow otherwise-compatible phones that use them, and require that they sell the cards to customers who want to buy them. Knowing Sprint & Verizon, at first they'd probably charge $999 per R-UIM card or require a 10 year contract to get one. In the long run, neither Sprint nor Verizon really want to support them, but if they were both forced to do it, eventually they'd start using them to compete with each other. For now, they're still enjoying the final months of a decade-long data duopoly. With a little luck, by this time next year, T-Mobile will be a viable alternative to them in most parts of the US.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

Yes it does.

Essentially, the iPhone runs a scaled down version of MacOS X optimized for a handheld device -- although Steve Jobs is insistent that it runs "real OS X" (Specifically, crashlogs indicate that the original iPhone ran "OS X 1.0" build number 1A543a.) -- but no iPhone models can run MacOS X applications regardless. On March 17, 2009, upon unveiling a developer's preview of the third version of the operating system, Apple started referring to it as the "iPhone OS".

http://www.everyipod.com/iphone-faq/iphone-runs-os-x-not-macos-x-cannot-run-macos-x-applications-skype-or-ipod-games.html

Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[Jonathan]

If you jailbreak an iPhone, you can open a terminal window running bash. If you type "uname -a" you'll see that iPhones run Darwin (the actual OS behind OS X), just like Macintoshes.

Re:Mac 2010 is now Vista

[cheftw]

People used to say, "Windows 95 is Mac 84." The roles have now reversed.

So now "Windows 95 is Mac 84." says people?

That's deep man.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[adolf]

I can SSH into my cheap Linksys router. It's got all of the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only a router.)

I can SSH into my iPod Touch (I don't have an iPhone). It's also got all the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only an iPod.)

So, I guess: If you were trying to draw some sort of distinction between the two things somehow, then you have failed.

Perfect Slashdot 'Phone

[dunsurfin]

I agree. The N900 is pretty much the ideal 'phone for the Slashdot crowd. I was pretty surprised that there was not more commentary on the N900 here - it is more open than the Nexus One or the Milestone, with more features than you can shake a stick at.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[drsmithy]

And not all that much has changed between NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. Anyone who used NeXTSTEP back in the day knows how remarkably little has changed since Apple took it over.

O.o

If a complete lift-and-replace of the GUI/display subsystem, massive kernel updates, major userspace updates, major API revisions, multiple new APIs, a new GUI and a port to a new hardware platform means "little has changed", exactly what needs to be done to say "a lot has changed" ?

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[rgviza]

Whoa! I beg to differ. Open an ssh shell to it. The underlying system is Darwin. It's the same set of core components and kernel that OSX is built from. I've done it and compiled a web server on it, complete with PHP and SSL. It's a base OSX system (think what yellow dog linux is to linux) which you can add any unix software you want to (including GCC). It's just slimmed down. From command line the functionality is identical. The system running on my phone is fully POSIX and UNIX compliant out of the box.

xxxxxxx-iPhone:~ root# uname -a
Darwin xxxxxxx-iPhone 10.0.0d3 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0d3: Fri Sep 25 23:35:35 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1357.5.30~3/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8920X iPhone2,1 arm N88AP Darwin
xxxxxxx-iPhone:/ root# ls -la
total 42
drwxrwxr-t 15 root admin 748 Jan 31 11:46 .
drwxrwxr-t 15 root admin 748 Jan 31 11:46 ..
drwx------ 2 _unknown _unknown 238 Sep 27 18:34 .fseventsd
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 30 Oct 19 12:04 Applications
drwxrwxr-x 2 root admin 68 Sep 26 06:40 Developer
drwxrwxr-x 14 root admin 680 Nov 2 15:03 Library
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Sep 26 04:50 System
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 11 Jan 31 11:46 User -> /var/mobile
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1972 Nov 2 16:26 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 68 Oct 19 12:03 boot
drwxrwxr-t 2 root admin 68 Sep 26 02:04 cores
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 1310 Jan 31 11:46 dev
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 11 Sep 27 18:36 etc -> private/etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 68 Oct 19 12:03 lib
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 68 Oct 19 12:03 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Oct 19 11:53 private
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1530 Nov 2 16:26 sbin
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 15 Sep 27 18:36 tmp -> private/var/tmp
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 306 Oct 19 12:04 usr
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 11 Sep 27 18:36 var -> private/var

xxxxxxx=myname

---about darwin---
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects.

Darwin forms the core set of components upon which Mac OS X, Apple TV, and iPhone OS are based. It is compatible with the Single UNIX Specification version 3 (SUSv3) and POSIX UNIX applications and utilities.[2][3]
---end about darwin---

And before you ask, yes I changed the root password when I installed sshd so my phone won't get h4X0red. I did it the day I installed it, not when the "sploit" was released.

As well the kernel version is still stamped 2.1 even though I'm on version 3.1.2. Get on the stick Apple!

To use your own analogy, it's still a chevy drive train, but with a 4 cylinder engine and a different body. It's just a different processor with less memory so you can't fit the entirety of OSX on it, and it's got a different UI.

It has chevy pistons, chevy crank, chevy piston rings, water pump, crank, bearings, and even has AC Delco spark plugs. You also drive it from point A to point B, it has a gas pedal, brake, transmission control and steering wheel, so the most important functionality is there.

The interface is different but it's still a Darwin unix system under the hood, same as OSX. Can it go as fast as a Mac? No. Duh? It fits in the palm of your hand.

You could, given enough hardware resources, compile the mac interface on this OSX but I don't think the mac interface supports the screen resolution comfortably and the hardware requirements are a bit steep. They designed a smartphone interface purpose built to do what the iPhone does and run fast on ARM hardware.

However, the GUI does not equal the operating system ;-)

It's just a GUI. You are right that the _GUI_ functionality is not close to the same. Peel the GUI off and they are nearly i

Warning!

[WML MUNSON]

The N900 may jeopardize your marriage.

--
Sent from my Nokia N900

How can you read slashdot and have an Iphone

[nibbles2004]

i think the Iphone is a toy like speak and spell, fun but a toy, there should be a N900 requirement to have slashdot in your favourites,

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[TheRaven64]

Yes it does. The kernel is the same. The libc is the same. The window server is the same. The Foundation framework is the same. The majority of the other frameworks are the same, although libobjc does not link against autozone. AppKit is replaced by UIKit, but that's the only nontrivial difference. There are more differences between a Linux desktop running KDE and one running GNOME than there are between desktop and iPhone OS X.