Android OS coming to the iPhone?
It looks as if Google’s android OS could be making an appearance on the iPhone in the near future.
A hacker on the iPhone Dev Team by the name of planetbeing has just announced on his blog that they have been succesful in booting up the iPhone using the Linux operating system. They’ve managed to reverse engineer the iPhone’s hardware drivers and have developed their own iPhone bootloader, called OpeniBoot, which allows them to dual-boot into either iPhone OS or Linux.
At this point, they have ported a Linux 2.6 kernel and it will run on the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and the iPod Touch. There is, however, a slight downside in that driver support is, at this time, very limited: no touch screen support means that using the Linux booted iPhone means connecting via SSH through a USB cable. Not all that practical but hey, a working prototype is a working prototype and this definitely represents a breakthrough in iPhone hacking.
iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.
So, with the iPhone this close to full fledged Linux computing, one can’t help but get a little bit excited about the prospect of running the Linux based Android OS on their iPhone. Android is the highly publicized open-source mobile platform developed by Google for use within the Open Handset Alliance. It recently made it’s debut on a G1 from T-Mobile.
If you’re interested in porting Linux to your iPhone, you can find the instructions here. You’ll need the Linux 2.6 kernel, which you can find here. As usual, if you wreck something, it’s not my fault… see the disclaimer.
I think I’ll wait for some progress with the driver support before my iPhone gets the Linux treatment, however my iPod Touch is looking like a suitable candidate for a little bit of USB driven Linux fun…
