Linux Boots on Treo 650

nilbog writes "A major leap forward has taken place in the development of Linux for the Treo 650. Grack.com has posted screenshots of a Cingular branded 650 displaying the familiar penguin logo. A discussion has sprung up over the the treo central forums where Shadowmite, one of the developers, has confirmed that it shouldn't be too long before they are able to get the phone's hardware working under linux. "

Mod parent down

[xchino]

Just a page hit whore, link goes nowhere useful.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask here

[Rayban]

I'm the guy who was doing the porting work. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here and save my poor blog's comment system.

It was a good thing I coralized all my images an hour ago!

Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her

[Rayban]

For those wondering if it's real, I've been working closely with Shadowmite (the Treo Hacker extraordinaire) and you can track our progress on his forum [shadowmite.com] or the not-as-up-to-date Handhelds.org Palm Treo 650 Wiki Page [handhelds.org].

We've also started documenting a lot of the hacking stuff we've discovered on the Shadowmite wiki [shadowmite.com].

Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her

[Rayban]

That was a bug in the LCD initialization. Actually, we weren't initializing the LCD at all - we let the phone's bootloader do that.

I managed to get that stuff working last night by setting the GPIOs correctly. The handhelds.org Linux kernel sets a GPIO (L_BIAS) that fubars the LCD. The latest version has the framebuffer working correctly (although I disabled the penguin for more screen real-estate ;)).

You can check out my blog at grack.com for updates.

Re:Treo vs PPC

[elleomea]

The 650 has a 320x320 resolution and integrated Bluetooth support. Currently as far as I'm aware there's only an odd WiFi sled type device (hooks over the whole of the back of the Treo making it a fair bit thicker, but also supplying an extra battery).

Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her

[Rayban]

We've opened the communicatation channels to share information. There are two other Palm PXA ports already - the LifeDrive and PalmTE ports. We can share a *lot* between those projects, but there's still a fair bit of information to gather for each individual device (ie: the LifeDrive has Wifi/USB off-chip, etc.).

I hope that we can all help develop a single distribution that would work on all three devices. It would certainly help lower the porting load. Also, those guys seem to have gotten pretty far - The LifeDrive guy already booted GPE!

This is where open source really shines...

Re:Treo vs PPC

[Rayban]

That's the Enfora WiFi sled. It's a nifty little device that works pretty well. The cool thing is that it uses PPP over the Treo's USB port, so it'll be supported under Linux with minimal work.

Re:Treo vs PPC

[WhiteDragon]

As you said, the treo 650 has built in bluetooth, and 320x320 resolution. I think I heard about somebody (probably shadowmite again) hacking in some sdio wifi drivers... *checks google* yes, here [engadget.com] it is.

Re:Locking?

[Rayban]

I'll answer these one-by-one:

    - Will a 650 running Linux still be locked to the provider's network?

Yes. The lock is enforced by the GSM radio, not PalmOS itself. If you have an unlock code, however, we can use it to unlock the radio for any sim card.

    - For us lightweights, will it be possible to revert back to PalmOS after installing this?

Yes. It doesn't replace PalmOS right now at all - it runs entirely in RAM. See answer below too.

    - Might there be a possibility of dual booting between Palm & Linux?

Yes. The plan is to replace System.bprc with one capable of booting Linux off the SD card when you hold down a certain key. This way you can just soft-reset into the other OS as you need.

Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her

[Rayban]

Most of that stuff gets handled by the radios. Both the GSM (Broadcom, I think) and CDMA (Qualcom) radios are full-fledged devices of their own with CPUs and firmware. The CDMA radio uses GSM AT commands, making a phone app just a thin wrapper over a serial port. It's like dialing a modem.

Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her

[Rayban]

The plan is to boot from the SD card eventually. Right now we just load the kernel into RAM and boot from there. There's no risk to your data with this method.

Re:Treo 600

[bhtooefr]

The 90, 180(?), and 300 are all Dragonball-based Palm OS 3.x (IIRC) and 4.x devices.

The 600 and 650 are both ARM-based (same CPU architecture - less OCing options doesn't necessarily mean a different architecture) Palm OS 5.x devices. IIRC, the main differences are the screen, and the 650's Bluetooth, and Flash memory instead of SDRAM for program storage.

SSH clients and tunneling

[jpostel]

The two SSH clients I know of are pssh http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/ [sealiesoftware.com] and tussh http://www.tussh.com/ [tussh.com]. I use pssh, and it has saved my bacon on a couple of occasions.

The only way I know to do application tunneling is to use one of the commercial VPN products for PalmOS, MergicVPN http://www.mergic.com/ [mergic.com] and AnthaVPN http://www.anthavpn.com/ [anthavpn.com] (which used to be MovianVPN).

IANA developer, but from what I've read, the problems are with the fact that PalmOS was never really meant to be networked or multi-tasking. The old-new version of PalmOS, Cobalt, (which I don't think will ever be used on a treo) was supposed to have this solved with a ground up rebuild rumored to be based partially on BeOS. The new-new version of PalmOS will be some sort of PalmOS-on-Linux hybrid from PalmSource/Access.

I have been using a Palm/Handspring since the PalmIII. I have had each version of the Treo on Sprint (300,600,650) and I think the hardware has gotten better with each revision. The hardware can still be vastly improved, but the OS needs an overhaul and Windows on a Treo is 'the shot heard round the Palm world'. If that does not kick the PalmOS developers in the pants, then I don't know what will. Competition is a good thing and Palm has been resting on its laurels a bit too long.

Re:Major leap forward?

[jericho4.0]

In fact, it's the difference between 'We don't know what's wrong, it's a black screen and we're not sure if we're reading these logic traces correctly' and 'We have a working toolchain, and the kernel is sending error messages to the display', it's the watershed moment in any port. Now it's comparativly straightforward to work with.