Trying to Get Linux Running on a Nokia E6

The Nokia E6 is a smartphone from back in the old days when Symbian was a thing. [fluffleswaffled] has been doing the work to get the ancient handset running Linux …. Trying to Get Linux Running on a Nokia E6.

[fluffleswaffled] has been doing the work to get the ancient handset running Linux instead, because that’s ultimately cooler than what the phone shipped with out of the box. There isn’t an unlocked bootloader on the E6, so instead, [fluffleswaffled] used an altogether different route to boot Linux. A Symbian app is used to load the kernel and device tree into RAM, at which point the MMU and caches are turned off and the device jumps into Linux.

It’s a one-way trip, from which there is no way back to Symbian without a power cycle. The setup nets a terminal on the phone’s own screen, and the hardware keyboard and touchscreen are functional. The display is controlled by a Broadcom VideoCore III, with [fluffleswaffled] capturing messages from Nokia’s original display driver to create a custom kernel driver that replays them.

The phone doesn’t stay in Linux land for long — it always resets within a couple minutes of booting into the alternative OS.