Re: [PLUG] Linux on Iphone

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

At 2008-04-01 03:21 +0530, Deepan <codeshepherd@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am wondering if anyone has managed to install
> linux on iphone? I am aware of ipodlinux, for
> ipod. Not sure if someone has hacked into iphone.
> Openmoko is a nice alternative though.

While that's theoretically possible (it'd need to be an ARM port of
Linux), it hasn't been done and the (completely undocumented)
device interfaces would make it pretty difficult to use the thing.

No matter what, you wouldn't be able to use the phone as a *phone*,
since the baseband is completely proprietary. (Yes, there are ways
to unlock the phone from whatever carrier its bound to in the region
it was sold, but that doesn't mean actually being able to speak to
the baseband, it just means fooling it into accepting a different
SIM.)

All that said: why would you want to? The iPhone includes a 9.x
Darwin install with a modified version of the Mac OS X display
libraries overtop of it. There's a GCC package targetting the
platform and various useful things (like a terminal app, SSH)
available in binary form. One can (and I do with mine) treat it as
just another Unix host. (Provided you jailbreak the iPhone, of
course, but installing Linux is going way beyond that.)

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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