The developer and hacker, Steven Troughton-Smith has managed to get MeeGo OS on Google’s Nexus S phone. This was done via the rootfs image on the internal memory, which means that he didn’t have to risk flashing his phone to get it running alongside Android 2.3 Gingerbread. By getting the MeeGo OS, he also marked a feat as getting it to be the first non-Android based OS to have been ported successfully on to the Nexus S.

If you are feeling adventerous yourself, you too can give MeeGo a chance on your Nexus S. As of right now, not everything is fully functional so you may want to think twice before jumping ship. It’s still a work in progress and hopefully with time, it will be improving.

So if you’re insane enough, you can try it yourself right now…

You will need to build a MeeGo rootfs first, in ext2 format. Use my kickstart as a base, it has a few niceties like adb support (i.e. the only way you can interact with it right now). With your image successfully compiled, copy it to linux/rootfs.ext2 on your Nexus S’ internal memory (completely safe, no flashing required).

My boot.img is here – you will need to use fastboot to boot it (fastboot boot nexuss-meego-boot.img), or you can flash it to recovery if you want to dual boot.

As seen in the photo, you won’t really be able to see anything onscreen, but you can use adb to get a root shell like on any Android device. Poke around, play with it, improve upon it, etc. Actually going much further than this is beyond me unless I can find some talented kernel hackers with Nexus S hardware to test on.

Go nuts!

You can see a video of it in action below:

The MeeGo OS wasn’t the only successful port either apparently. Turns out that Ubuntu has been ported too using the same method. If you are interested in getting Ubuntu on your phone, you can find out more about it on the XDA-Developers forum.

Ubuntu on the Nexus S (natively) – files and instructions you need to get it working: https://bit.ly/hGRuxT

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(Source: High Caffeine Content, Steven Troughton-Smith (Twitter) (1), (2))

Authors: _GadgetNews

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