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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

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

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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