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 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. You can then run palm-install to install a package onto your Pre (or onto the Pre Emulator), 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 Windows there is not a novaterm program, 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 users: Novacom on Windows. -- detailed walk through for Mac OS X users: Novaterm on OS X 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 Setup SFTP DDNS for EVDO

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