redsn0w linux<p>I recently succumbed to the call of the iPhone.
I’ve had it for about a week, and I like it a lot.
All except for the fact that it’s tied to Apple’s App Store.</p>

There's a whole world of third-party apps out there, but they're not available in the App Store.
So, I decided to take a chance, and "Jailbreak" my phone, which involves using third-party software
to patch the iPhone's firmware.

Information on how to do this from Windows or OS X is pretty easy to find, but instructions for doing
it on Linux are sparse.

Generally speaking, you can find the instructions for downloading and using redsn0w to jailbreak your phone here.

The missing instruction for Linux users is that you must run redsn0w using "sudo".
If you run it as a "regular" user, it will hang when it first says, "waiting for reboot".
I didn't investigate very deeply, but my guess is that a non-root user doesn't have permission to write to the usb device.

Once I ran "sudo redsn0W", it ran as advertised, worked perfectly, and installed Cydia.
Now I'm off to play in a new universe of apps!