And the n900 aka the 'pute', is the first proper mobile phone, to run Unix, ooh la la.

they see me rollin...

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/L...Mobile-Phones/




"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

Not everything running Linux can be sanely termed UNIX (or, for that matter a "proper mobile phone"). While I don't know all of the devices on that list, the N900 is certainly the first phone I'm aware of to ship with a recognizably UNIX OS.

Plus a few non-Linux *nixen such as found on a range of phones made by a certain fruity company, and last year's sidekick that runs NetBSD.

What about the Openmoko Neo & Freerunner then?

Android is, to paraphrase Google, not Linux. There is no absolute technical reason you could not run Android on a Windows CE or Symbian back-end, they simply have not done so.

And LiMo is similarly Linux-in-kernel-only, using an entirely closed userspace stack (done so deliberately.)

Both of which make an explicit effort to hide the *nix backend.

Were both even less mass-market than the N900, had (IIRC) software and hardware issues. Awesome concept, not so awesome execution.

I remember learning unix commands almost 17 years ago. I remember back in grade school when there was this old arse hunch back teacher that had a bunch of the first computers ever made in a basement where he taught us dos and he also had a few of the first apple computers.

Even the iPhone runs on Unix (BSD), but Apple is doing a good job hiding this fact and protecting it from the user.

AFAIK, their goal was to present only a dumbed-down smartphone interface (Qtopia, IIRC) -- with actual UNIX visibility only present in development builds -- but I'm not really familiar with them, and could be way off-base.

Could be some argument about "proper mobile phone", too, without EDGE, especially, but I think I'd give them that one.

So when will my n900 include translation into cuneiform?