Sunday, October 17, 2010

PalmSDK on Gentoo Linux

I dislike my phone and my carrier. Once my current contract is up I would love to switch carriers and get a new phone. One option is a WebOS device, the Palm Pre or Pixi. Since I don't want to buy anything without trying, I thought it would be fun to try out the emulator that is provided in the PalmSDK (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). Here is how I installed the sdk on Gentoo:
First add the sunrise overlay:
layman -a sunrise
Unmask the sdk and novacom and emerge:
echo "=dev-embedded/PalmSDK-1.4.1.427 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

echo "=dev-embedded/palm-novacom-1.0.55 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

emerge PalmSDK palm-novacom
Add your virtualbox modules to load at startup and load them now:
echo "# Load VirtualBox Modules" >> /etc/conf.d/modules

echo modules="vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp" >> /etc/conf.d/modules

modprobe vboxdrv

modprobe vboxnetflt

modprobe vboxnetadp
Add the novacom to run as a service and start it:
rc-update add novacom default

/etc/init.d/novacom start
Add your user to vboxusers group:
usermod -G vboxusers -a username
Now you can run the emulator (not as root):
plam-emulator
If all went well you should get prompted to select which device you want to use.
If you got a "missing version string error" instead, it most likely means your virtualbox modules are not loaded (see modprobe code above to load them).
To access the console you can use:
novaterm
Enjoy using WebOS!

2 comments:

  1. Sean,
    I have no clue what you are doing with this, but it looks good. I vote for the Palm Pre. But I have heard the Pre 2 is coming soon (although what I read on it wasn't that much of an upgrade from a Pre). I recently updated to the iPhone 4. Kinda loving it. But I'm a mac guy.
    AJ

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  2. I'm more or less just seeing what I like. I'm going to try to do the same thing with Android too. The Pre2 is much like the iPhone 3G to 3GS. Most people say they like webOS, the hardware is the problem.

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