TuxRunner

So just in the past few weeks I’ve been seeing a fair amount of news articles and blog postings around the Internet showing attempts at getting other OSes running on the Nokia N900.  Some of them are surprising, and others aren’t.  But here’s a small list of some examples of other operating systems that have been known to run on the N900.  Yes, some are under an emulated environment, but I’m still counting it even if it is emulated.  What I’m not going to dive into here is the console game systems that have been successfully emulated on the N900.  That’s a whole other article.

Windows 3.1/95/98/NT4 – Appears that it’s possible to run Windows on the Nokia N900 under an emulation package called DOSBox.  DOSBox has been around for about 8 years now and runs on many different host OSes such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.  It’s emulates an x86 PC with DOS and includes sound, graphics, joystick, mouse, and modem support.  DOSBox was ported to Maemo5 and allows the N900 to run old video games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.  So since it emulates a full x86/DOS environment, why not try running one of those older OSes to see if they work?

Android – Another one that has been catching a LOT of press lately is Android 1.6 running natively (not under an emulated environment) on the Nokia N900.  There’s two things that make this pretty significant news.  The first one being that the person that got it to work did it in a dual-boot setup.  So the Nokia N900 he hacked can still run both Maemo 5 and also Android.  The second reason this is significant is that it opens up the possibility that you can take advantage of all the fantastic apps available to the Android platform and use them on your N900 as well.

PalmOS – Miss the old days of PDA’s when things were simple and 160×160 pixels was all you needed to manage your life?  You can relive that by running the Garnet VM emulator on your N900.  Unfortunately, it appears that the install isn’t that simple at this point.  Check this blog posting at PalmInfocenter.com for information on how to do it.  Requires a bit of hacking to make it work.

Mac OS X – Engadget is running a story showing a Nokia N900 successfully (if that’s what you call it) running Mac OS 10.3 under PearPC which is a PowerPC emulator.  Toni Nikkanen of Finland apparently is the first person to get this to work.  It’s completely unusable though.  The video below shows it running, but as he states in the video’s comments it took “1.5 hours to reach the About this Mac dialog screen”.

So what else is possible? Well, really just about any open-source OS can be compiled to run on the N900.  Possibilities that exist include FreeBSD, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, Fedora, OpenSuse, Haiku, and many others that exist out there.  If you expand the possibilities to running under emulation, then it’s easy to see that the N900 can probably run just about any OS as well (within reason.  OSX is a bit unreasonable on this hardware). What remains to be seen is if a company like VMware or Sun will port over their hypervisors to N900 to allow it to run simultaneous VM’s.  Running Maemo5 AND Android or Windows Mobile at the same time would be an interesting setup on the N900.  VM’s are entirely possible, as VMware has been testing this out already on some older Nokia tablets.  The sky’s the limit really!