Is it possible to hack my phone on Linux?

Overview

Linux has partial support for phone hacking. Unfortunately at the time of this writing, the linux version of p2k commander does not support CDMA (or at least not the verizon v3m). There is another application called moto4lin which also seems not to work well if at all with CDMA phones. I personally use BitPim and have had pretty good success at doing a lot of things running BitPim under Linux. Your particular distribution may have a copy of BitPim in the repositories. Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint can all access BitPim from the repositories - however the last time that I checked, it was an outdated 0.9 version. At the time of this writing, the current version is 1.0.5 with the next official release coming out soon - tomorrow from what I've heard from the developer.

Something that should also be mentioned here is the fact that on older verizon firmwares, the usb transfer ability has been disabled, and as such the initial "unlocking" would need to be done on a windows based computer that has all the necessary applications for doing a seem edit.

Drivers

Linux should not need to have any drivers installed for the phones, as they come preloaded with most distributions. If your distribution does not seem to have drivers (your phone is not charging) you need to get the cdc_acm driver.

Notes on bitpim current version

ringtones are still set in the code to go to /motorola/shared/audio. However on newer firmware phones, this location is no longer valid. On top of that, they may have Brew locks in place on the actual location, /motorola/shared/ringtone. If you are using a different model phone than the v3*, it will be different even than that.

For receiving the best support on BitPim, it is recommended that you download the developers package from their website.

Taking things further

The bitpim source code is easily attainable and well documented online. The program is written in python which is an easy to learn language. It is possible to run bitpim from source code instead of installing the developers build or a build made by your distribution. This is extremely handy for modifying parts of the code to work with your specific firmware. There is no easy way to tell you go here and get this and it will make everything okay for your phone. The best place to start is to visit the link above and follow their link to the development section. At that page, they describe everything that is needed to get started developing bitpim code.

One thing that I have noticed is that for the v3m, v3c, and v3cm modules, the ringtone root is set by a separate module for the moto v710. The file that contains this information is located in the src/phones/p_motov710 file. Simply altering the location in that file *should* be enough to sort things out for the v3m newer firmwares from verizon.

Additional Notes

Theres more that could be said about this (and probably should be said), but I'm not really trying to write an essay in here. If you have any further questions about hacking in linux, there is a forum thread for general linux hacking questions, as well as a thread about DUN in Linux. I may also add in a distro specifics section if I get some reports about quirks in getting the application to run.