Hacking the iPhone

yep it's unix
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

The iPhone has been out not quite two months, and already benevolent hackers have been working hard to open up the platform.

With the help of community-built toolkits like "Jailbreak," serious Unix geeks have been installing new applications on their iPhones for weeks now.

For those of us a little less certain about DIY mods to our $600 cell phones, there's now a nice, hand-holding GUI interface -- Installer.app (Mac OS X only; there's a roughly equivalent program for Windows that is named, somewhat unsettlingly, iBrickr) -- that walks you through "jailbreaking" your iPhone and putting a nice Unix package installer on.

Once Installer.app is up and running, you can install everything from programming language runtimes (Perl, Python, Ruby) to OpenSSH and standard Unix apps like the Apache web server.

iPhone "Finder"

Cool.