14 DAY TRIAL // Linux phones are becoming more of a common thing these days, with more and more companies investing in such a device, but as it turns out, you can actually create your very own Linux smartphone at home without spending hundreds of dollars.
Someone has managed to install postmarketOS on an iPhone 7 using the checkra1n jailbreak tool that helped flash a Linux kernel on the device.
As you can see in the screenshot here, the project doesn’t yet have a GUI, so everything comes down to the command line, but given it’s all just a work in progress, further improvements are obviously on their way.
How to try it yourselves on an iPhone 7
The developer has provided a thorough look at the project, as well as installation instructions for those who want to try the whole thing on their own iPhone 7, in a post on project-insanity.org.
“I hope this will bring further progress to custom Linux operating systems on Apple devices. There are already experiments with dual booting and partitioning. So maybe it could be possible in the future to get persistent storage on the phone for Linux systems!” the developer says.
“Be careful, the following steps are considered safe to use but this is still experimental and could brick your phone. Use it at your own risk!”
It goes without saying there’s a long path from getting a command line OS to run on an iPhone to the point where you can actually use Linux as a daily driver on a mobile device, but the good thing is that the work in this regard advances well. This gives hope that at some point in the future, Android and iOS would no longer be the only mobile operating systems to choose from, especially now that Microsoft, BlackBerry and others have already given up the fight in this market.