If possible, how to install Linux on an iPad?

General Linux Question
1

Hello Friends

My uncle has an iPad. The hardware itself is in good conditions and I am not sure when it was manufactured. I requested the exact model to know the complete specs. According with my understanding is not possible do an upgrade about the iOS

I want to know if is possible install Linux in that kind of hardware. If you have a specific recommendation to accomplish this goal according with your experience, pls let me know

Thanks for you understanding

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2

IOS is itself a derivative of BSD Unix
You can run a virtual machine on IOS

It seems to depend on which model

I dont know about a native Linux install, sorry.

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3

There is a web site

But the suggestion is not yet. But no date as to when.

If the ipad still works then continue to use as is but the older version of the safari browser may not let you access modern https sites so the only solutions I have found to get over that is to install chrome, but not all original ipads will allow that. I installed opera and that works but slowly due to age of machine.

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4

No.

Sorry… The best I was able to do on a 3rd Gen iPad was jailbreak it - that gave me access to the BSD UNIX shell (might have been bash - too long ago to remember) - that’s it…

I’m quite happy with both my iPads (iPad Pro 12.9 from 2017/18) and 6th gen iPad mini… Both are still getting regular updates… No reason to jailbreak them… I mostly use the mini as an e-book reader (which was what I used the iPad 3rd gen for previously).

My iPad 3rd gen (which I got for free) sits in a drawer… Stuck on iOS 9.x or something… even if I un-jailbreak it…

I LOATHE iPhone - but - I’ve had several Samsung android tablets - and iPads leave them in the dust… IMHO iPadOs is still the best tablet O/S.

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5

I have an old 2nd gen ipad too! Tried to make it faster by formatting it almost 1yr back ig but it had very less effect. Although maybe useful for reading…gotta check its condition…

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Thanks to all for the replies

So far it seems it is tricky. Interesting

I am going to read the links provided. I hope https://getutm.app let use almost all the hardware resources. Not such as VirtualBox which defines a limit to use the half of hardware, it for CPU and RAM. Of course it is other scenario but I hope you see my point

Thanks to all

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7

Depends on the age and if its already at iOS 11+

Bonne courage, keep us posted we may all learn something that way

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8

What he said…

I actually use UTM on both my M1 (Apple Silicon / i.e. arm64) MacBooks - it works well - it’s basically a frontend to QEMU. Works best with native arm64, but I’ve used it to emulate x86 and run Windows XP and also Sparc (Solaris 2.5).

I see no reason to run it on iPad though…

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