I know there was some project about this but haven’t heard of anything for a while. Ewaste is such a crime; all of my devices are used or older purchases that are past their “cool by” date. I have an iPad 2 and iPad mini that function perfectly but aren’t supported by apple anymore. Would love to get a second life for them instead of having to get rid of them for no good reason.
Not possible right now. Apple wants you to buy a new iDevice.
I would consider buying one if I could stray from their OS.
The project you’re thinking of is probably PostmarketOS, though it doesn’t look like anyone’s started work on an iPad 2 or mini yet.
They’re on Lemmy now, so that might be a good place to follow up (or if you’re curious to start hacking away at anything yourself)
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !postmarketos@lemmy.ml
Probably offtopic, but are there any popular old android tablets that run linux proper?
Yep! I personally have the Galaxy Tab A 9.7.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Do note that even those marked community still have some issues: click the links directly to see the state of the OS.
Not android but I ended up going with a surface go 2 running pop os. It’s a little tricky to get going but works great so far.
check the postmarketos wiki. they have a couple of options…dunno how well supported though.
Wouldn’t be surprised if some XDA madman has created all the tooling and has Arch ready to go…
Time to learn kernel programming.
Getting a Linux mobile OS on it would probably have a lot of issues, Ubuntu touch for example just supports the most popular phones as of now.
However it would work in theory you’d have to do some really weird low level gymnastics and one shot the execution to run Linux natively.
Alternatively you could use a VM to run Linux and try to work around that.
Disregard that, I see that the iPad 2 and iPad mini are not eligible since the min iOS version is 11. All devices since 2012 work though, hope that helps someone else. Sorry.
See here for a table https://iosref.com/ios
Unfortunately, it looks like some of the hardware is pretty funky. People have been working on it, on and off, and gotten the kernel to boot on some iPads, but things like bluetooth don’t work and there appear to be no prepackaged solutions for even the basic kernel yet.
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Nope. Big issue is Apple’s proprietary bootloaders for which there isn’t a great open source version.
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