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Hackers boot Linux on iPhone

A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel.
Written by Chris Duckett, Contributor
A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel.

The announcement of the successful kernel porting was made on the Linux on the iPhone blog, complete with instructions and source code.

Although a bootloader, kernel and a Busybox terminal are able to be loaded - many features of the iPhone remain unimplemented: touch screen, sound, accelerometer, and networking. Input to the terminal must be made via a USB interface from another device that the iPhone is attached to (humorously summed up by Geek Hero Comic).

The group that ported the kernel is derived from the iPhone DevTeam group which has been responsible for jailbreaking previous iPhone software.

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