A few days ago, we reported a successful installation and testing of minimal postmarketOS Linux on iPhone 7 by project-insanity. Now they’ve successfully unlocked another feature moving forward from the command line to graphical user interface (GUI).
Earlier they ran postmarketOS with no GUI using a persistent system image from the iPhone system memory. This time, Project Insanity is able to set up every sort of graphical window manager — Wayland’s minimal and fast composer, Weston, for instance. For the same, they used tools and techniques that Corellium uses in their Android build for the iPhone.
This looks incredible and the project is a step away from enabling and connecting to other devices using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. It won’t be as hard as Corellium has already implemented the same into their custom kernel.
To run Linux on iPhone 7, insanity began with the same step of compiling and preparing postmarketOS images using pmbootstrap utility tool. But this time, instead of ‘no-GUI’, they used Weston as the user interface.
The rest of the procedure followed the same old guide as compiling the kernel with custom ramdisk and flashing the system image and kernel using the checkra1n tool. Once finished, they booted the process up into a graphical user session.
The successful running of Linux graphical UI has opened up further expectations from this project. Hence, we can surely anticipate new updates in the coming days about the implementation of phone calls, SMS, or MMS.
Until then, if you also want to try this, I would recommend you to follow step by step instructions from their official blog here. Or, you can directly drop an email to the project leader Onny to contribute to the project.
