Pros, this is a heads up. If you’re into the whole installing of one OS on a competing brand’s hardware, this news is for you. It seems that some folks including XDA Developers Forum member stroughtonsmith (aka our friend Steven Troughton-Smith,) and a crack team of other smarties have booted MeeGo unto their Nexus S phones from a rootfs image on their internal memory. Know what that means? No flashing! As our pal Smith notes, MeeGo seems to be the first non-Android OS to be successfully running on the Nexus S.

All you hackers, hear this set of instructions. If you’re new to this sort of thing, I recommend trying an easier project before you work with this. First, grab and build a MeeGo rootfs in ext2 format. Next, courtesy of Smith, use this kickstart as a base and note that it includes adb support, this being the only way you’ll be able to interact with it at the moment. When your image is compiled, copy it to linux/rootfs.ext2 on the internal memory of your Nexus S.

Next, use fastboot to boot [this boot.img], or if you’d like, you can flash it to recovery if you’d instead like a dual boot. From here, you’re on your own. Again, if you didn’t understand anything above this sentence or feel like it might be too difficult to accomplish, just don’t do it! If it seems like a bunch of fun for you, feel free!

Currently there are a few items that are disfunctional –
Touchscreen,
Super-AMOLED brightness control (meaning it’s pretty dark,)
Wifi,
More

What works for sure –
ADB root shell,
X11 and UI apps

Check it out, let us know how it’s going. – Thanks for the tip, Steve!

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