Portal:Accessing Linux
Accessing Linux (Rooting your Pre is the Old Inaccurate Term)
The Palm pre is a Linux based device. As it is shipped, the linux is a fully installed and operational copy, and communicates with the outside world using the Novacomm protocols (the same as used by the iPhone.)Therefore, enabling access to the Pre was remarkably simple and is officially documented by Palm in the public emulator instructions. Typing in the "developers code" ( upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart ) enables communication between the Linux and the outside world using novacomm.
After that, 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.
One of the first choices was installing a package manager for the OptWare library of over 1000 Linux programs, compiled for the Pre.
Once this is done, basically, anything you can do on a Linux box, you can do on the Pre. The community is rapidly working on developing methods for Linux programs to interact with the end-user shell known as Luna or Mojo in addition to access via terminal programs.
The following links will walk you through the process of obtaining access to the Linux system from a terminal program, and installing the community standard software package.
It is necessary (as of this edit) to access the Linux operating system via a terminal program running on a separate PC. You can not achieve root access to the Linux operating system on the phone from the phone itself. However, once you have achieved secure root access, it is possible to make any changes you like to the underlying linux system on the phone.
The process of obtaining access to the Linux is actually a fairly simple procedure. Look below.
Note that if you are running the Pre emulator, you can achieve Linux access on the emulator (not on the real Pre) by using an ssh client (e.g. PuTTY on Windows) to connect to 'root@localhost' at port 5522 on the host machine (which is port forwarded by VirtualBox to the dropbear ssh daemon running on port 22 inside the emulator), and the instructions on this page are not required - you should go straight to the [[[next-steps|next steps]]].
Before you startPlease make a note of this page: How to recover You might also want to consider backing up any files you have in the usb drive portion of the Pre. |
Procedure:There are four versions of the secure root access procedure:
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