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Video Daily: WebOS running on PC hardware

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 17 May 2010 12:00 User comments (4)

Video Daily: WebOS running on PC hardware According to PreCentral, forum member cdowers has gotten the Palm mobile operating system WebOS to boot on PC hardware, getting it to run on a Dell C600 laptop.
It seems he pulled off the trick by using the WebOS emulator image (which works on x86 processors) and putting it on an IDE hard drive (not the newer SATA standards).

Now, instead of WebOS running on a virtual machine, it is running on a real machine, says the source.



The forum users does say there are four glaring problems still:

1) handle interface issue (touchscreen/gesture area, faux mouse... not to mention the accelerometer issue)

2) drivers. seeing as it's running on top of an x86 kernel... maybe it's just an issue of running a different kernel with some patches? It's hard to say on this one... it really depends on how much palm patched the underlying kernel.

3) software/gui. The gui doesn't draw right at anything but the native 320x480 / 320x400 resolutions (yet). Will likely require a virtual keyboard of some sort (there's a patch for that already).

4) binary compatibility, for apps that don't use the PDK it's matter of correctly translating the mojo framework calls. PDK based apps aren't going to work at all without being recompiled for an x86 processor (anything that uses PDK now is compiled for ARMv7... I think).


Regardless, it is an interesting experiment and the short video is worth watching.

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4 user comments

117.5.2010 00:26

Didn't HP already do this with the slate?

217.5.2010 13:08

errr...I am totally missing the why anyone would want to do this. Unless it's just another because we can sort of thing...

317.5.2010 22:16

Now we just need usb touchscreen support and native pc display support and you have a webos tablet.

418.5.2010 00:28

Then all you need to do is to hack the webOS tablet so you can install Android on it!

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