Many folks enjoy hacking their smartphones in order to use the latest operating system, apps, and other tools. This has been going on for quite some time in the Android and the iOS world, but it is finally coming to Windows Phone in a big way.
Yes, it has always been possible to root a Windows Phone device with ease, but there wasn’t much a user could do apart from installing ROMs, whether they be official or edited. However, the option has been made available to add another operating system to Windows Phone devices, and it is the now-defunct Windows RT.
To do this, users will need a software called Windows Phone Internals. This tool allows the user to unlock the bootloader on several Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8.1 or even Windows 10 Mobile.
A hacker who goes by the name Wack0Distractor has successfully installed Windows RT on the Lumia 520. This is interesting because the Lumia 520 is not one of the most powerful Windows Phone devices. It is the most popular due to its price.
The whole thing is an odd mix since Windows RT was designed for tablets and the Lumia 520 is a smartphone.
For now, Windows RT on the Lumia 520 is not usable, but it shouldn’t take too long before a video pops up with the operating system running.
“After patching signature checks out of winload, and adding the halexts and registry entries for those, I had to patch 1 byte in the kernel, without which a SECURITY_SYSTEM bugcheck happens during boot,” according to Wack0Distractor. “I haven’t fully added any drivers yet, other than the halexts, I’ll be doing that soon. So right now touchscreen doesn’t work etc.”
For those who might have no idea what Windows RT is, it is a version of Windows 8 designed for touch, released by Microsoft a while back. The Surface RT came with this operating system, along with several other devices from different OEMs.
[“source-techtimes”]
