Palm Pre SDK (Mojo) on Linux

Home > Javascript, Personal > Palm Pre SDK (Mojo) on Linux

Palm Pre SDK (Mojo) on Linux

July 14th, 2009

Virtual Pre

Update: Palm released the SDK, you can download a Linux, Mac Or Windows-SDK at : http://developer.palm.com/

The windows-version of the Palm Pre SDK leaked out last month; though still in beta it’s supposed to work, but unfortunately the installer itself is Windows only. Wine-to-the-rescue! I installed the SDK using Wine and checked the installed files. I found the emulator as a VirtualBox image in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Palm/SDK/share/emulator/images/sdk47, in windows it looks like it’s booted from a bat-file using several jar’s, but that doesn’t work on linux. So I added the virtual disk to the “Virtual Media Manager”, created a new virtual machine with 256 mb ram, added grub.iso as CD-rom and tried to boot the VM. Booting worked, kind-of; the bootmanager complained about “undefined video mode : 360″, if you don’t select a display-mode the VM will eventually halt with an error

PmCertificateMg[1092]: segfault at 0 ip 0804fd18 sp bf869228 error 4 in
PmCertificateMgrService[8048000+b000]

If you do select a video-mode the emulator will boot, however; the Virtual Pre doesn’t understand the resolution and controlling it with the mouse is very difficult. It seemed the Virtual Palm needed the right resolution to work OK, but this resolution/video-mode is not available from the bootmanager.
Then I found this post, you need VBoxManage to add some configuration to VirtualBox, so open up a terminal and enter:

VBoxManage setextradata "NAME OF VM" "CustomVideoMode1" "320x480x32"

Change NAME OF VM to the name you’ve given to the VirtualBox instance (and keep the quotes!), boot the VM again and your Virtual Palm Pre should work like it’s supposed to.

After playing around with the VM I’m quite impressed with the Pre. I was considering a Nokia N97 because the Palm is still not available here in Holland (and it will probably take some months before they release it here), but having seen the Pre-software in action I decided to keep using my 3-year-old Nokia E90 until the Palm is available here. As soon as I get the chance to look at the SDK in detail I’ll post my findings here, there’s supposed to be an Eclipse Plugin somewhere in the SDK, can’t wait to try that and write my first “hello world” TwitterClient (a tutorial on writing your first app for the Pre can be found here, has nice wordpress-skin too!)