Archive for November, 2008


Dual Boot Linux on your Iphone

posted by @ 19:38 PM
November 30, 2008
Dual Boot Linux on your Iphone

Well it seems the iPhone Dev Team has done it again. A member by the name of planetbeing was able to reverse engineer enough of Apple’s hardware drivers to get a port of linux running on the iPhone and first gen Ipod touches. This first attempt however is very limited in function. So far, only drivers for the framebuffer (which controls video), serial communication and some basic interrupts (like the clock) have been included. No touch screen drives have been included in this release, so commands are entered via a desktop computer using a USB communication client. A custom bootloader was also written which lets you choose which OS to boot once the phone is powered on. While this release is still in early form, the success of this project opens up many new possibilities for this platform. One exciting thing people were talking about was one day being able to load google’s new open source OS “Android” on to the iPhone and being able to dual boot between those. Having Android running on Apple hardware would make for an interesting combination. Once NAND write access, baseband, wifi, and sound drivers are released, things will really start to heat up. The official announcement and project blog can be found at http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2008/11/linux-on-iphone.html

UPDATED: It seems the iPhone Linux Team has made enough progress to successfully load an older version of Debian Linux on to the iPhone. It shouldn’t be too much longer before we have a true dual booting iPhone with two different OS’s.
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Hands on with the Gigabyte M912X Netbook

posted by @ 0:32 AM
November 19, 2008
Hands on with the Gigabyte M912X Netbook

The Gigabyte M912X is the latest netbook offering from Gigabyte Taiwan. This compact computer features a few exciting additions that we have yet to see from any US netbooks so far. For the most part the M912X shares the same internal specs of many other netbooks available. The core of the netbook boasts a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of ram (max 2 GB), 160 GB hard drive, 8.9in screen, wifi and all your standard ports and card readers. What sets this netbook apart from the rest is the ability to switch in to tablet mode with the built in touch screen. Not only does the screen feature touch and a swivel hinge, but it also has a higher resolution than most other netbooks of its size.
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Solderless Touch Screen Kit Now Available for Acer Aspire One

After pretty much breaking my new Acer Aspire One last week (from carless soldering while trying to install a touch screen) it is only typical that just today a solderless version has been released on ebay. The touch kit is compatible with the Aspire One as well as the Asus 901, and offers the ease of not having to solder a thing. The link for the kit can be found by clicking on the post title, it costs about $96 dollars and ships from Taiwan. For those of you brave enough to try this, the kit seems to come with everything that you would need, including install instructions. Now I’m off to buy a Gigabyte m912x.