Almost anything is possible on an iPhone with a jailbreak. A user on Reddit has now succeeded in booting the Linux distribution Ubuntu on an Apple smartphone. The device was an iPhone 7 from the year 2016, which is one of the Apple products on which the Apple unpatchable “checkm8 “-Bug is present – this applies to iPhones up to the X. The error in turn allows the execution of the popular jailbreak checkra1n, which is regularly updated and also already for iOS 14 is available.

Netbooting with Linux In the case of Reddit user newhacker 1746 there was a problem with his iPhone 7 the internal NAND memory, this is “dead”. So it was no longer possible to run iOS. For this reason, he decided to run Linux via netboot. This actually succeeded with a largely unmodified Ubuntu version 14. 04 for ARM 64. The boot process took place via USB gadget Ethernet.

The prerequisite was the installation of checkra1n 0. 10. 2-beta, a directory that can be written via NFS including a DHCP server in the local network, the kernel fork for h9x / A 10, an ARM 64 – cross-compiler or a native ARM 64 – Device and a setup script including udev rules that newhacker 1746 has provided on Github.

Android also worked If Linux is running on a jailbroken iPhone, this is also possible with Android. In fact, this has already been demonstrated on an iPhone 7. As part of the “Project Sandcastle”, Corellium, which is legally at odds with Apple, demonstrated that this is possible via jailbreak. A multi-shoot with Androod and iOS would also be conceivable here. Pack volume.

If you want to try Ubuntu on the iPhone, you can take a look at the corresponding step-by-step instructions here. In the meantime it was even possible not only to boot up to a prompt, but also to the default GNOME desktop. This would also make practical use of the iPhone under Linux conceivable.

(bsc)