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March 12, 2008 12:00 AM PDT

Dual-booting the iPhone

by Ben Wilson
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Dual-booting is an oft-used solution in the desktop realm, where users value the capability to boot multiple versions of an operating system from the same volume (e.g. Windows Vista and XP, Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, Mac OS X and Windows on Intel-based Macs). Now a similar solution has been released for the iPhone, allowing users to boot multiple iPhone OS versions (e.g. 1.1.1 and 1.1.4) from the same device. This capability may come in handy when a future, SDK-compliant iPhone OS release (2.0) is released and users with to maintain compatibility with old "jailbreak" applications while taking advantage of enhancements in the new release.

Detailed by Jonathan "NerveGas" Zdziarski, the process is quite involved and requires some command line work. Zdziarksi writes:

"I'll walk you through a sample jailbreak scenario with 1.1.4, using 1.1.1, to show you what I mean. To do this, you will carve out a new partition on the iPhone and install version 1.1.1 on it. You'll then upgrade the iPhone to v1.1.4, which will leave the new partition intact. You can then dual-boot the iPhone, allowing you to mount 1.1.4's partition using the 1.1.1 partition."

Feedback? info@iphoneatlas.com.

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by dhirajpiste1 March 12, 2008 11:37 AM PDT
This would be more interesting if someone ported Palm OS and Linux to the iPhone...

I'm sure it will happen at some point...
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by ebernet March 12, 2008 1:58 PM PDT
@ libertyforall1776 ...
Why would someone port Palm OS to the iPhone? For what god awful reason would you want to use that antiquated piece of junk on an iPhone?
And why bother with Linux when you have OS X on the phone? Any Linux app you may want to run on it you could modify it to work with the native OS?
I see a reason to have two versions of the iPhone firmware. I don't see the purpose for doing what you purport...
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by dhirajpiste1 March 12, 2008 6:18 PM PDT
Oh, and I want Windows Mobile on my iPhone! ;-)

NOT!
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by brum234 September 16, 2009 5:09 AM PDT
Palm OS on a Treo Pro or the Touch Pro2 - pimp. I can't give up on Palm OS, nothing can do what I'm doing with a full qwerty atm.
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