Portal:Accessing Linux

Accessing Linux on the Pre or the Pre Emulator

The Palm Pre is a Linux based device. Palm provides a simple method to access Linux running on the Pre or the Pre Emulator.

Once you have access to Linux, everything else is a process of installing a community standard library of Linux programs so that users have the same tools and options available to them. Once this is process is completed, pretty much anything you can do on a Linux box you can also do on the Pre or the Pre Emulator.

The following procedures will walk you through the process of obtaining access to Linux on the Pre or the Pre Emulator, and installing the community standard software packages.

Before you start Please make a note of this page: How To Recover If you are unfamiliar with basic Linux command usage, you should visit this page: Basic Linux Use Disclaimer Enacting any set of instructions from this site has the (remote, but greater than zero) potential to void your warranty. Our intention and the specific design of all instructions is such that you should be able to recover using the webOS Doctor should anything go wrong, and put your Pre back to a state which is indistinguishable from a factory-new Pre, but we give no guarantee. Use any information from this site at your own risk. At the very least, you should be prepared to lose all data on your phone at any time. We cannot tell you what you should do - we provide the information, but it's up to your own sense of personal responsibility to determine what you do with that information. We require you to use the webOS Doctor to put your Pre back to factory condition before contacting Palm or your cellular carrier for service or support. You might also want to consider backing up any files you have in the usb drive portion of the Pre.

Procedure: Download the Palm SDK. Install it using the Palm SDK installation instructions. If you are on Windows 7, the SDK may not install properly. You need to follow special instructions here from PreCentral to get the Novacom to install properly. Note that this will not install the full SDK, which is not necessary to access Linux on the Pre. You can then run palm-install to install a package onto your Pre (or onto the Pre Emulator) The next step is different for different operating systems: If you are on a Mac or Linux, you can type novaterm instead of 'palm-install' to directly access the Linux command line. If you are using 32 bit Windows XP or Vista there is a novaterm program at the following address: novaterm1.zip Download it and unzip it into the sdk/bin directory. Then, just like the Mac and Linux users you can just type novaterm. If you are on 64 bit Windows Vista or Windows 7, novaterm isn't running yet, but you can type novacom -t open tty:// to achieve a similar outcome to using novaterm on the other platforms. Long Versions -- detailed walk through for windows 64 users: Novacom on Windows. -- detailed walk through for Mac OS X / Linux / 32 Bit Windows users: Accessing Linux Using Novaterm Follow desired steps from the 'Next steps' below.

Advanced Topics Adding Disks to the Emulator Backing Up via Rsync

Next Steps Set up users, Optware, and access (Strongly recommended) Applying Patches DDNS for EVDO Setup SFTP

Obsolete Pages

There are three other old deprecated, unsupported, and much more difficult versions of the secure root access procedure below. These were developed before the Palm SDK was publicly available and are no longer required (since using the Palm SDK and novaterm is so much simpler and more reliable).

• Windows XP or Windows Vista via USB cable (novaproxy)
• Mac OS X procedure via usb cable
• Linux procedure via usb cable

If you followed very early sets of obsolete instructions (even before the ones above), you might need this page:

• Change from loopback
• Alternative optmedia & LVM