webOS up and running on PC hardware 36
PreCentral user cdowers looks to have successfully booted up webOS on a Dell C600 laptop. The trick, apparently, is to take the webOS image from the emulator (which is compatible with x86 processors) and put it on an IDE hard drive (not the more modern SATA standard). Essentially what's happening here is that instead the webOS emulator running in a 'virtual' machine, it's running on the real machine.
Whether this will pan out into actual, usable builds of webOS for PC hardware remains to be seen - there are plenty of challenges to overcome, as tavik points out. Either way it's a great experiment and the webOS community is already busy planning patches to make the emulator operate at the proper resolution, get mouse input, and so on.
Thanks to Julian for the tip!
36 Comments
sweeeeeet
haha I was wondering it that was possible just the other day.
I would love to throw that on some of our decommissioned work laptops. webOS would bring those 2005 mobiles into the new world!
lol I've got an old laptop that I was getting ready to partition up and run linux on.... Mayb I'll have to dual boot with webos for fun
OH the possibilities of this! Nice work all!
Would of been cooler if he got it working on a HP machine :)
Given the emulator was an x86 build from the beginning I wondered if someone couldnt have done it already, so props to cdowers for showing it is possible.
Today Palm itself cant stop telling either that webOS "scales" as seen in this blog post to wellcome AT&T users:
http://bit.ly/btuQWP (link to Palm blog)
http://blog.palm.com/palm/2010/05/
"And we
Whoa, there are some smart people out there.
I want it on an iPad.
Makes me wonder if it's possible to get it running on a DELL Lightning...
He should have used an HP laptop.
proof that better hardware still won't help with the slow boot up of the device lol
Bazinga!
Now the fruit company can bite it !!! =)
one wonders about putting it on an old EEEPC with a touchscreen mod....
It's all about the drivers.
I finally have a use for my 2003 dell! I wonder if there's a way to map the trackpad as a touchscreen... just without the whole "screen" part.
Wow, this does open up new products. I bet our friends in the far east are going to have a hay day with this. I can see the "Chinese Clone running WebOS" spam now.
Nice idea but yuck - having to use keystrokes!! Blecch!
man im excited! WebOS on my tablet pc please!
Well, what about porting this to the iPad? :-) That may solve the "get-us-the-webos-tablet-soon" problem...
I am seriously about ready ro throw this phone against a wall... A can't stand it anymore!!! Ever sincw that last patch that was supposed to FIX the damn "too many cards" error, that's now all I het. I can't fucking do anything if I have more than one or two cards up! I've doctored the damn thing, reset it, everything. And now I can't watch this damn video cause of it.. And this keybored is WAY too fing small and this thing is so top heavy!!!
what the heck are you running on your Sprint Palm Pre? Because whatever it is the app is eating up your memory.
I've noticed this while having Slacker or Pandora running for long periods of time it likes to fill the cache up. Or running 3D gaming on the original Pre you don't have enough memory to do anything else.
first you need to find what is using up your memory need it be an app or some kind app running in the background such as email. Then you close it before you do other memory intensive stuff. Also ease up on porn on your device. I've noticed that certain porn sites like to hijack your browser in the background and that also eats up memory. So I have to restart the phone to end those pesky porn sites from using my stuff in the background.
What? That's right I went there and admitted looking at porn on my Pre.. So.. I'm a guy.. We do those kind of things. LMAO at least I'm man enough to admit it.
oh and as for the keys being too small.. What are you like the size of a line backer from the Chicago Bears? If so there is no smartphone keyboard big enough for you. Sorry bro. I'm an athlete and have a labor intensive job so I have man hands. Yet I just typed this all out on my Palm Pre with no problems. You my friend are just one of those people that complain about everything and nothing never will be good enough for you until they make technology that syncs to what you have of a brain and just reads your mind on what you would like to do with your device. Then your phone will reverse transmit that you want to purchase more apps and Steve Jobs voice will come in your head saying you want my products I control you now.. Lol
sorry over active imagination. Don't take offense just check what apps are being greedy about memory usage. That's all the "too many cards" message means. Just your out of memory. Draw back of the Sprint Palm Pre. It's only got half the memory of all the other Palm Pres in the world because it was the first one. You want to be the first to have new technology sometimes you have to deal with a flaw. Oh well I enjoy my Sprint Pre since release day. :-)
I was getting the same "Too Many Cards' (TMC) errors (even with no cards open on a fresh reboot on a freshly Doctored phone) on my 6/6/09 Sprint Palm Pre until I installed the Super PreKernel and overclocked it. Since I did that, I haven't gotten any TMC messages.
Can't help with the keyboard though. :)
I am going to get one of those useless tablet PCs that microsoft declared to be the future a few years ago... So I have a touch screen...
hopefully jason is already making drivers...
This is great!
Note that by only adding video, touch screen, and wifi drivers, it could have ran on the Slate. There's a good chance that off-the-shelf linux drivers already exists for the slate components and with the virtual keyboard patch for WebOS the lack of physical keyboard is no problem for general testing.
Given that the iPad is basically an iPhone4 with a bigger, higher res screen and larger battery, I think its plausible that the rumored Hurricane is based on an engineering sample of the Pre2 (or whatever) attached to a bigger/higher res screen and larger battery.
first thing i thought about when hp bought palm was that the emulator already runs on x86, so porting it to their current "slate" hardware would be really easy and it would run incredibly smooth.
It isn't very fast on the Dell because it's only a 1 GHz Pentium III with 256 Mb ram.
ah ok, I was wondering about the speed on a more powerful device ... maybe someone can install WebOS on a up2date computer to test how long it takes to start
-> if it also takes 1 min palm have to think about improving bootschedule(or something like that)
I have got a thinkpad r50 with celeron m (1,3GHz) ... can I improve the boot time on this hardware :P
a full linux (ubuntu 9.10) needs 40 seconds to boot :D
shouldn't this be on an HP device?
Ironically, this would be the closest thing to a "Java station" that could actually be usable for home computing. And it's 20 years late :P
seriously though. If its this easy to port webos to an old pc, what existing tablet pcs and/or slates/tables are available now? Maybe someone can get it on a jailbreak ipad. Imagine the kind of buzz we'd create!!!
There's a bunch of slate pcs for sale on Ebay. Maybe this can be done to them. There's even the HP Slate! But that's too expensive I think.
Anybody willing to try it on those pc's?
Are you going to put the steps or make a video on how to do this? I know a bunch want to try on existing hardware & maybe on some slates that are available now. Anybody know how to port to another phone?
http://torontoescort.xxx/
boydhenry953@gmail.com
Draw back of the Sprint Palm Pre. It's only got half the memory of all the other Palm Pres in the world because it was the first one. You want to be the first to have new technology sometimes you have to deal with a flaw. Oh well I enjoy my Sprint Pre since release day. :-)