Filed under: OS, Open Source, iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage

Call it the Touchable Penguin. OK, the touchscreen drivers aren’t there yet, but the simple, scrolling shell output of a Linux kernel running on the iPhone represents a big achievement for the iPhone Dev Team and dev lead ‘planetbeing.’ The build is far from complete — no wireless networking, no sound, no writeable support for the NAND flash memory — but it’s still very cool, and the effort involved was substantial (the team had to reverse-engineer the iPhone’s boot loader so they could write their own).

Having a working Linux kernel on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touch handhelds might seem frivolous, but imagine the ability to run other touch phone OS platforms on top of an iPhone (like, perhaps, Android)… very tempting. You can see more of the rationale behind the Linux-on-iPhone project here, or you can skip to the second half of this post to see the video.

[via Engadget & Erica]

Continue reading iPhone hackers achieve a milestone: Linux boot

TUAWiPhone hackers achieve a milestone: Linux boot originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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