That’s right, an iPhone Dev member by the name of “planetbeing” has ported Linux to the iPhone.  From the post on the iPhone Dev Blog

This week’s funday is today!  Devteam member planetbeing has done a phenomenal job reverse engineering Apple’s hardware drivers and now for the first time ever, linux is available on the iPhone and first-gen iPods.

And from planetbeing’s blog

I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.

What we have:

- Framebuffer driver
- Serial driver
- Serial over USB driver
- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn’t been ported yet):

- Read-only support for the NAND

What we don’t have (yet!):

- Write support for the NAND
- Wireless networking
- Touchscreen
- Sound
- Accelerometer
- Baseband support

The current userland we’re using, in the interest of expedience, is a Busybox installation created with buildroot, but glibc works fine as well, and we’re going to build a more permanent userland solution.

And now on to the demonstration of linux working on the iPhone.

http://www.vimeo.com/2373142

Here are the instructions.

http://www.iphone-dev.org/planetbeing/LINUX-README.txt

EDIT: The instructions are missing the step that you have to select openiboot console from the menu before performing the “sudo ./oibc” step. Just be aware you have to do that if it seems like you’re not getting a response from the oibc client.

Project lead: planetbeing

Contributors: CPICH, cmw, poorlad, ius, saurik

Definitely an exciting time.

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