Linux hits the iPhone. Do you care?

In the annals of history, November 28, 2008, is unlikely to stand out as a Big Day in Computing. What happened? Well, a group of developers ported Linux to the iPhone, setting off a wild night of Digging and backslapping.

Meanwhile, not a single person outside the geekiest of the Linux community could even muster a yawn.

One member of the iPhone Dev Team tried to posit some compelling reasons for the port, but the best it could muster was this:

...iPhone Linux will actually be of tremendous value. There will be no more need to port applications over: The applications already run on the iPhone! Also, with a familiar kernel, we can do all kinds of things I've wanted to do: doing security related work with the wi-fi for example. Plus, knowledge that we are gaining/will have gained about the iPhone hardware will be of incredible practical value to the homebrew iPhone community. We've always wanted to be able to plug in the iPhone as a simple USB mass storage device. With USB and NAND FTL drivers, we can actually implement this ourselves.

So, there you have it. Are you racing to the AT&T store to buy an iPhone that you can hack to run Linux and all of its many (?) applications? No, I didn't think so.

Look, Linux is fantastic. There's no question about that. But there also should be no question that it's not really all that useful on the iPhone. It's nice that someone proved with a science project that they can run Linux on the iPhone, but it has little practical value even for the Linux community, much less than mainstream users who just want something that works, and don't inquire into operating systems.

The Linux community has better things to do.

[deepwave]

Actually the iPhone port makes sense in the long term. It makes it possible to create a solution that say, lets you change your locked-in Apple experience to less locked in Google Android experience. And IF an Android-ed iPhone indeed proves superior to the default iPhone, then Apple may have something to worry about. Of course this is a long shot.

[dneary]

"The Linux community has better things to do"?

I'm not under the impression that we're infinitely wide and deep, but the Linux community is *very* diverse. There are people who get their kicks booting a stock Debian distribution on Nokia's N8x0 tablets, just to show them running OpenOffice.org. There are people who got their rocks off porting Linux + a TCP/IP stack to a Coke machine a few years ago, to have an internet application showing how many bottles were left. Those people were the precursors of the explosion of Linux in the embedded OS market. They made Linux as portable and modular as it is.

I was amazed when I heard about the first guys to port Linux to a Playstation 2 - and now there are game consoles running Linux.

And now Linux is attacking the mobile phone market, and people are porting it to high-end luxury phones. I say great! They're community members who wouldn't be doing anything else if they weren't doing that, and what they're doing has value to them, and I suspect to the Linux community at large.

[rapier1]

You might have the coke machine story wrong. All of the internet accessible soda machines I've heard of all use an external box that samples the soda machine state and man of them predated Linux. You connect to the external box - not the soda machine itself. My Alma Mater had the first internet accessible soda machine in 1985 using a DEC-10 and the finger protocol to report the state. By the time I left in '91 I believe the first GUI for it had been developed and they were using an old Sun workstation.

[CoffeeZombie]

The only complaint I have about this is that the people who made this work apparently felt the need to justify their attempts. ***? What ever happened to the hacker community that needed no reason for this sort of thing than simply "wouldn't it be cool if..."? That is the kind of person that made Bell Labs a bastion of technological innovation. Sure, maybe their work has no obvious, apparent benefit, but who knows what it could lead to? And even if it leads to nothing, so what? They had a good time doing it.

Personally, I think it's cool. Am I going to rush out to buy an iPhone to run Linux on it? No. Why? Well, for one thing, I can't afford it. For another, I'd still be giving money to Apple. But, hey, if these guys want to do it? More power to them.

[dragonbite]

Once it gets started, people will come up with reasons. Not everybody can hack a kernel or install on embedded devices from scratch but may be visionaries or pretty good with porting or developing applications. So this could prove interesting, or just a fun experiment.

I'm sure the Android people may be more interested in this though.

[Perry_Clease]

I personally don't care, but as an Apple stockholder if it helps sell more iPhones then it is fine by me.

Breaking news! StarPie is selling iPhone clones with Linux preinstalled :)

[kelmon]

"Linux hits the iPhone. Do you care?"

No. Sorry. It's a nice technical experiment and running Linux on something always seems like a challenge relished by the techies, but I don't see what sort of impact it is going to have on Joe User.

[jssixfour]

How about Joe Plummer?

[John Howell]

But then remember, the iPhone just happens to be a portable computer, with a touch screen, 8 - 16 GB of storage, a halfway decent ARM CPU, motion sensors, wifi (cellular and 802.11) and a basic 3d GPU.
Now if you thought there were a few applications in the App Store, thats nothing compared to what is available to Linux, and if recompile could therefore work on the iphone too.
X11 server on the phone providing full client features to a terminal at your desk, yes this could be done. Small NAS storage server, yes, this could be done too. Beowulf cluster of iPhones, why not 8)
Can you do any of this legitimately with the iphone OS? not really.

[john.mark]

Matt, I'm disappointed. All great innovations start with some fun hacking that may or may not have served a greater purpose at the time. Hacking the iPhone might lead to nothing (most likely) or it might lead to something greater - you don't know until you try. The promise of open source is that it's cheap to try a hack with few if any consequences if it fails. So if a Linux iPhone distro emerges and manages to attract a dev community, it will be a good thing.

With all the talk about Joe user, you risk forgetting about Joe developer, who wants to scratch his itch and try out new and interesting things. Joe developer is a very very important piece of the open source ecosystem - without him, it wouldn't exist.

-John Mark
http://tinosc.blogspot.com/

[John Howell]

Also remember the hacking community kept the Newton alive much longer than Apple.
I have 2 original Xboxes used daily thanks to XBMC, well after MS have stopped supplying the local shops with consoles and controllers.
To me, the iPhone hardware is what Palm could have made if they hadn't sold their soul to MS so they could run WinMobile. Maybe a port of Palm OS to iPhoen could also be done, now that would be neat as I could finally synch it properly with outlook/exchange without having to use iTunes.

[AppleSuxLeo]

I use FlashBlock...never see any irritating Apple ads any more.

[TimBowden]

Linux on the Iphone? I'd be in that once it's stable and reliable. I don't expect it to be wildly popular, but so what. It means my mobile environment will be compatible with my everyday desktop environment, and for me that's great. I've been on a linux desktop for my consulting work for some years now, and having reliable integration between my desktop and mobile device is a good thing, even if that isn't supported by the vendor. The Iphone just got put on my future buy list.