Google Glass rooted and hacked to run Ubuntu live at Google I/O

Today at Google I/O the company held a session entitled "Voiding your Warranty" where employees demonstrated how to root Google Glass and install Ubuntu on it. What you're seeing above is a screenshot from a laptop running a terminal window on top and showing the screencast output from Glass on the bottom -- here running the standard Android launcher. The steps involve pushing some APKs (Launcher, Settings and Notepad) to the device using adb, then pairing Glass with a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. It's then possible to unlock the bootloader with fastboot and flash a new boot image to gain root access. From there you have a full access to Glass -- just like that! Running Ubuntu requires a couple more apps to be installed, namely Android Terminal Emulator and Complete Linux Installer. The latter app then lets you download and boot your favorite linux distro (Ubuntu, in this case). You're then able to use SSH or VNC to access Ubuntu running right on Glass. We captured a few screenshots of the process below. Follow the links below for more info -- just be careful not to brick your Glass ok?

Gallery: Glass hacking at Google I/O 2013

Filed under: Wearables, Mobile, Google

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Source: Google I/O 2013