Linux On The iPhone... A Milestone To Nowhere

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo. Planetbeing, a hacker from the iPhone Dev Team, figured out how to port Linux 2.6 kernel to the iPhone over the weekend, which is a huge breakthrough for most iPhone users. It's not quite ready for users yet since there are a lot of steps that still need to be taken in order to retain all the functionality of the iPhone. Above is a video proving it's possible to have Linux on your iPhone, and below is a list of everything the dev team has and has not figured out yet (a serious list of omissions).

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 general view from developers and consumers a like is that the idea of having Linux on your iPhone sounds cool, but what are the practical benefits? Of course Linux as a platform is extremly stable and a plethora of free open source software options available. Initially the thought that you will be able to start porting linux applications to your iphone is exciting, but the more you think about it that excitement may start to fade. Even if all the features missing are fixed there are still many questions left unanswered. With Linux you lose the visual aspect that most consumers are used to, and for you hardcore gamers out there, I would not recommend it. Even if the vast array of problems are fixed, how would the many applications that have been designed and developed for a desk top operating system environment work on the iPhone, which presents a vastly different user paradigm? What about programs like Gimp (the photoshop equivalent on linux)? Would an application like Gimp with tons of tool bars and visual components work on such a small screen? How many Linux applications can really be ported directly to the iPhone without modification? Another major question to be asked is what kind of GUI can be developed and ported over to the iphone? Without a GUI how useful would it really be to have Linux on the iphone? So, yes this is definitely exciting news and a major breakthrough, but a breakthrough to what? Is this something that has any chance of benefiting the average consumer? Most blogs are talking about this development, but not really touching on why someone would actually want this... What do you guys think, what benefits and downfalls do you see of having Linux on the iPhone and where do you see this going?

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