Why does a jailbroken iPhone/iTouch use debian packages? And The filesystem seems much like unix.?

Question

I have been watching my iPod Touch Closely lately, and i noticed, that when it is jailbroken, it uses much the same filesystem and packages and many other things as an unix machine. I thought it was supposed to be a watered down version of osx, not unix. Did the iPhone Dev Team do this to mock apple? Because cydia packages are in .deb format, a debian package. And MobileTerminal runs much the same way as in linux. With the sudo command, the su command, and the icon too. Just Curious. Thanks.

Answer 1

i think that apples OSX is based off of unix. And jailbreaking it allows you to do more with your Ipod Touch, like see the filesystem. i noticed that too and was thinking more or less the same thing. I don't know much about OSX and how any of there files work. its possible they use debian packages too. I just think its a good thing that i know a decent amount about Linux and it makes having a jailbroken touch a lot better.

Answer 2

Mac OS is written on a Unix backbone. Apple computers wrote their own version of Unix called Darwin OS. If you open up mobile terminal on your jailbroken iPhone, or terminal on your Mac and type "echo $OSTYPE" (without the quotes), it will return darwin# the number is the version number 9 for the iPhone, and I think 13 for the Mac, it could be 12 though I don't remember.

Answer 3

MacOS X is a Unix operating system.