PDK on Linux
The official Palm PDK development kit for writing native programs is not supported on Linux.
The instructions on this page should allow you to get the official Palm webOS PDK for OSX working on Linux.
It's totally untested other than running a few scripts and confirming that things seem to be where they should be, so please confirm if it works for you.
Prerequisites
Get the command line tool "xar". Some debian based systems have it, try apt-get install xar. If not found, get it from http://code.google.com/p/xar/ (I needed package libxml2-dev to compile it)
WIDK cross-compile repository is really helpful as it already has functionality to download and extract the OSX PDK, most of which will "just work" on Linux. It can also download the CodeSourcery toolchain for Linux to replace the one included in the PDK, built for Darwin.
Setup
Get the Palm PDK using the Webos-Internals makefile
This downloads Palm's DMG file, downloads and patches a tool for converting DMG's, and runs it against the Palm DMG, ending up with an IPKG .pkg package file.
git clone git://git.webos-internals.org/preware/cross-compile.git cd cross-compile make doctors/Palm_webOS_SDK-Mac-1.4.5.465.pkg
You now have a Palm_webOS_SDK-Mac-1.4.5.465.pkg in doctors/ .
Extract that .pkg file
Now let's extract it into / (this will create /opt/PalmPDK)
xar -xf doctors/Palm_webOS_SDK-Mac-1.4.5.465.pkg palmpdk.pkg sudo sh -c 'gzip -cd palmpdk.pkg/Payload | (cd /; cpio -i)'
You now have a Palm PDK in /opt/PalmPDK, but you don't have a working cross-compile toolchain, because the one Palm supplied was for osX / Darwin not Linux. We need to fix that.
Get CodeSourcery Linux cross-compiler
Install the CodeSourcery Linux cross-compiler toolchain where Palm's toolchain built for OSX was.
make toolchain sudo cp -r toolchain/arm-2007q3 /opt/PalmPDK cd /opt/PalmPDK sudo mv arm-gcc arm-gcc-darwin sudo ln -s arm-2007q3 arm-gcc
Someone who is familiar with the PDK should test this at this point to see if you can actually use it in the proper ways.