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I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS
- jasonhansel 7y agoAdd it to my list of "nice things we can't have inside the walled garden"
- sequoiar6868 7y agoneed rooted ?
- filchermcurr 7y agoYep, you'd have to be jailbroken / rooted to use Cydia.
- ashton314 7y agoSorry, I must have been out of the loop. When was the jailbreak for iOS 13 published? (I'm also a complete stranger to jailbreaking—never done it before.)
- tolqen 7y agoA bootrom exploit has been found that works on all pre-2019 iOS devices.
- judge2020 7y agoSometime in December, but Checkra1n is still in beta and only works up to the iPhone X since the bug was patched on the newer 2019 iPhones. https://canijailbreak.com/ https://canijailbreak.com/
- earenndil 7y agohttps://checkra.in/ https://checkra.in/
- angott 7y agoThere is an exploit that can be used, but it only works on old devices (iPhone X and older).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- heavyset_go 7y agoCool! I gave up on hacking on the iOS and macOS platforms because of how hostile Apple is towards it. It's nice to see projects like this, I just hope that the rug doesn't get pulled out from under you after sinking time into it.
- MaxLeiter 7y agocheckra1n (current jailbreak for devices with A10 or older chips) is based on a BootROM exploit, so thankfully I can keep my iPad on newer iOS versions and remain jailbroken.
- pabs3 7y agoDo you know if checkra1n could eventually allow Linux based operating systems like Android or Debian to run on Apple mobile hardware?
- kccqzy 7y agoWho's going to write the drivers?
- nemosaltat 7y agoYeah, I sunk a few hours into trying to get Docker running on a jailbroken iPhone. It’d be awesome if all the arm work done for Raspi (et al) since the last hey day of Jailbreaking, could be easily ported to arm64 (Darwin)
- jsjohnst 7y agoRaspberry PI runs the Linux kernel, hence Docker is a relatively easy lift. iPhone runs Darwin, which has none of the low level primitives in the kernel (cgroups, namespaces, etc) that Linux does, so good luck with that!
- pabs3 7y agoPerhaps the same folks who previously had Android running on the iPhone 3G a decade ago: https://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-on-iphone-3g.html https://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-on-iphone...
- marinhero 7y agoVery cool, I wish jailbreak wasn't needed! Hopefully this shows Apple that people want to use their iPad as coding machines too...
- prox 7y agoWhat are you missing right now? I have been very happy with Buffer and the new files system, panes for multitasking, + VNC.
- asdff 7y agogive me root or give me death
- tinus_hn 7y agoI give you... an Android tablet.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago* I sell you... a bad experience.
- divbzero 7y agoI have recently been coding on iPad using a combination of Working Copy [1] and Termius [2]. [1]: https://workingcopyapp.com/ https://workingcopyapp.com/ [2]: https://www.termius.com/ https://www.termius.com/ Working Copy is an amazing graphical Git client and integrates fully with iOS Files. But for now SSH/Mosh via Termius feels closer to a traditional dev environment. It gives me full access to the command line, tmux, vim, etc., and mapping caps lock → esc sidesteps the lack of an iPad escape key and would be my default on a computer anyway. I would love to have the best of both worlds: a traditional dev environment local to my iPad and integrated with native iOS APIs.
- month13 7y agoTossing this in for people interested, Kodex (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kodex/id1038574481 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kodex/id1038574481) is a great text editor that can integrate with Working Copy locally.
- rvz 7y agoInteresting porting effort here for X11 on iOS. I'm not sure why I would use this but wouldn't it be beneficial for more iPhone jailbreak users to have Android dual-booting on their iDevice device? If that were to happen, I would never need to buy a second phone like I would just use my single Macbook to triple-boot Windows, Mac and Ubuntu.
- MaxLeiter 7y agoDual booting would be far better, but isn't possible right now. It's theoretically possible thanks to checkm8 (https://twitter.com/axi0mX/status/1177542201670168576 https://twitter.com/axi0mX/status/1177542201670168576), but will require an enormous amount of work. This was something I knew I could accomplish
- _jal 7y agoWell, for starters, you'd need to reverse engineer drivers for custom Apple hardware, some of which is hardened against that. ...And about 37 other extremely difficult things later, Apple would sue you.
- saagarjha 7y agoUnder what grounds?
- badsectoracula 7y agoUnder the grounds of making them sad and you having way less money than they have.
- reaperducer 7y agoYou can do whatever you want with your own gear. Apple doesn't go after you until you start spreading it around.
- kbumsik 7y agoI am confused, so is a X11 stack/server runs in an iOS device natively (not remotely) but you need a VNC client since a X11 client is not implemented yet?
- MaxLeiter 7y agoYep. Someone more familiar with Swift/iOS internals can probably write a proper client as an app, but I can't do that at the moment
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- minxomat 7y agoYou can do the same today, without a jailbreak using https://ish.app/ https://ish.app/ which is an x86 emulator capable of running on the latest iOS / iPadOS versions. I do actually use it for work. Plus it works with standard x86 alpine Linux packages.
- tech234a 7y agoThere’s a short tutorial on their wiki for anyone interested: https://github.com/tbodt/ish/wiki/Running-a-VNC-Server https://github.com/tbodt/ish/wiki/Running-a-VNC-Server
- hsitz 7y agoI'm sure many people find ish.app useful. It failed for me mostly because the emulation layer slows things down too much. I wanted to run emacs on my iPad Pro (2017) and it is indeed straightforward to get it (and many other things) running under ish. Maybe some people would be happy with it; for me the sluggishness of emacs in ish made me look for other solutions. At the moment, I'm using iVim, which works great and is a native ios app so very snappy.
- aasasd 7y agoI guess technically you can, but emulating x86 on arm sounds horrible. (Friendly reminder that nothing like JIT is allowed on iOS for third-party code.)
- ilammy 7y agoYou just reminded me of jwz’s portability efforts to keep XScreenSaver from being rewritten from scratch™ in the newest fad every time it comes around. He literally implemented X11 on top of Cocoa on top of UIKit on top of OpenGL on top of OpenGL ES just so that his hacks can still run. Though I wonder what will happen when Vulkan becomes the substrate API.
- hackcasual 7y agoGlove on top of MoltenVK?
- rs23296008n1 7y agoGood for him. Each to their own. That said, those hacks must be legendary for him to go to those lengths. Frankly I'm surprised xscreensaver is still around given all the various changes to window managers. I've probably still got a few machines with a locally compiled version of xscreensaver lying around.
- djsumdog 7y agoI think I just have one machine that still runs it, but I like xscreensaver and glad it's still around. It has a huge selection of screen savers, more than most other desktop environments, and they were all so cool!
- fit2rule 7y agoEvery now and then I catch up with xscreensaver and I'm convinced jwz is a madman, intent on eventually implementing Emacs.
- inoop 7y agoThis is an absolutely batshit crazy idea. I love it.
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoThis makes me happy. I have so much X11 code written over the past few decades, and I always fall back to X programming when I need to do something fast and in C. I've written a few simple iOS apps, but was frustrated with GStreamer support. Of course I have no idea what Cydia is... off to wikipedia.
- sudosysgen 7y agoFor anyone else, Cydia is a dpkg based package manager for jailbroken iOS
- cannedslime 7y agoFinally xeyes!
- app4soft 7y ago> If you're interested in using X11 now I'm interested! Take a look on AzPainter[0] — modern looking desktop app for painting, written in pure C with own toolkit built directly on top of X11. Would be happy to see it ported to iOS.[1] FTR, AzPainter already ported to Android, thanks to Termux app dev team.[2] [0] https://github.com/symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/symbian9/azpainter [1] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues/76 https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues/76 [2] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues/6 https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/issues/6
- wyxuan 7y agoShame that newer devices can’t have this
- rs23296008n1 7y agoBeing ignorant of all things jailbreaking, is there a reason why X11 the display can't run on iOS? Surely an ios app can run a persistent background server, eg web? Or is it the swapping out/pausing that is the problem? Or is the answer to these simply a sharp edged and loud NO? We-say-so etc. I fully get why Vnc/X11 as a screen sharing facility wouldn't work - no access. I also get why running a full devel environment would be pain for a "normal" developer to implement - again, no access. This is all ironic because Apple market their iPad Pro as a professional device AND the cpu/ram is obviously plenty good enough (they themselves said so). The thing is more powerful than a Pi. And it meekly manages to compile quite a lot. My little Pi collection is now at 5 members and growing. So, Apple, why can't I compile apps for ios on ipados? Hmmm? Wheels for the mind, think different etc
- ericlewis 7y agoI would guess it depends on how this was implemented really. If you’re using private apis then it is a no go. But if you were to somehow only use public apis to fill the x11 apis then it would maybe be okay.
- rock_artist 7y agoThere are 2 parts indeed. Jailbroken - provides ability of root / non-sandbox interaction. Without it, each process is sandboxed: * you don't have access to other files (you can have some ability to have shared folders but it's very scoped) * you can't do much IPC if I remember correctly. So you're capabilities are more limited. Even if those were not critical, X11 as an environment would be useless as you'd need to have it on each app you build because the AppStore requires pre-compiled or interpreted code. You're not allowed to have an app that download other apps...
- vbezhenar 7y agoYou can download JavaScript code. Though that would require rewriting an ecosystem or at least porting everything to wasm.
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- e1ghtSpace 7y agoReminds me of Qmole.[0] [0] https://github.com/chriskmanx/qmole https://github.com/chriskmanx/qmole
- tooker 7y agoBravo
- mnem 7y agoAn iPad is certainly a thin client... More seriously though, while I am (or have been) persuaded that the restricted environment of iOS generally does make sense for the majority of people, I’d love to see official “blank” iDevices or an open developer mode available for them. Perhaps something similar to being able to install Linux on PlayStation’s. They make very nice portable computing platforms for prototyping and development.
- dmarinus 7y agoWouldn't porting Wayland be easier and more future proof than porting X11?
- MaxLeiter 7y agoWayland is linux only, and will require significantly more work. Some work has been done on macOS, so maybe one day...
- ericek111 7y agoWhat's with all the hype? This has been done over 10 years ago: http://ingvar.blog.redpill-linpro.com/2009/11/17/running-native-x-applications-locally-on-your-iphone/ http://ingvar.blog.redpill-linpro.com/2009/11/17/running-nat...
- bdcravens 7y agoWill the approach in the article you linked work today?
- rijoja 7y agoWhat about RDP would that be a possibility?