Disclaimer (WebOSInternals' credit)

Enacting any set of instructions from this site has the (remote, but greater than zero) potential to void your warranty. Our intention and the specific design of all instructions is such that you should be able to recover using the webOS Doctor should anything go wrong, and put your device back to a state which is indistinguishable from a factory-new device, but we give no guarantee. Use any information from this site at your own risk. At the very least, you should be prepared to lose all data on your phone at any time. We cannot tell you what you should do - we provide the information, but it's up to your own sense of personal responsibility to determine what you do with that information. We require you to use the webOS Doctor to put your device back to factory condition before contacting Palm or your cellular carrier for service or support.

Please report any issue to shr-devel attt lists.shr-project.org with subject "PalmPreInstall" to help us in our project. Thanks

What to expect

This howto will help you how to install a recent SHR image on the Palm Pre/Pre? Plus/Pre? 2 device. We try to not lose your data from WebOS which can be installed in parallel, but don't be surprised if not! Don't expect a usable phone after you installed SHR too! You have been warned. That said, currently the installation is quite safe. Your device is backed up before doing anything, so you should be able to restore your data later. See Status section to see what progress has been made

NOTE: You DON'T need to do any of these following command as root!

NOTE: Think about updating the fso-installer(makefine) yourself as It can be updated and as it is not yet selfupdatable.

Install SHR on the Palm Pre, Pre Plus and Pre 2

This guide suits all Pre variants devices. It is relatively straightforward regarding which device you have.

Manual installation

Note: you have an automatic installation guide below

Needed things

• a computer with linux installed
• an active internet connection
• your device
• the webos doctor corresponding to your device (see  WebOS Internals' wiki)
• novacom,  and just novacom!

The following three steps are the basic steps you need to use the fso-installer.

1. Create a "downloads" directory and put in there the webos version you have downloaded, something like webosxxxxx.jar .
2. In our working directory (not in "downloads/" !), download the fso-installer (a Makefile  http://git.freesmartphone.org/?p=utilities.git;a=blob_plain;f=palmpre/fso-installer/Makefile;hb=HEAD )
3. You have then to modify only two things in the Makefile : TARGET and CONFIG_WEBOS_MEDIA_TARGET_SIZE as explained at the top of the Makefile

Note: You will need a kernel and an image to flash, You can find some for example on the SHR build host :  http://build.shr-project.org/shr-unstable/images/ for the unstable image

Reboot your device into 'flash' mode

Power your device off, hold the volume up key and plug a usb cable in (the other end should be in your computer). Wait until the usb logo is on the screen, then run the following command:

make memload

Backup up everything

Before we execute any of the steps below we backup every data from your device to be able to restore it later. You do that with entering the command while the device is connected:

make backup

Resize internal flash disk of your device

To flash a SHR image to your device we first need to get some free space for it. As of the initial state with webOS installed there is all space required by webOS. Some parts are used for the webOS system and the biggest part ist used for the media partition. This one we need to resize in the following steps to get some free space for SHR.

First you have to decided how many space you want for the webOS media partition left. You specify this in the Makefile with adjusting the CONFIG_WEBOS_MEDIA_TARGET_SIZE variable.

As next step we start the resize process by entering the command. It will resize the internal lvm partitions and create a new one for SHR which will be used for flashing later.

make lvm-resize

Restore back your data

After having resized your internal flash disk you should want to restore your data back to your device's data partition:

make restore-media

Intall the bootloader

To be able to boot the system and to switch between webOS and SHR on boot you need to install the bootloader called bootr with

make install-bootr

Flash the kernel

Flashing a kernel is very simple. You just need to download or build a kernel for the device and flash it with the following command to the device:

make KERNEL=~/path/to/your/kernel/uImage-palmpre.bin flash-kernel

If you don't want to have to provide a kernel then just use this command which will download the last unstable one:

make wget-kernel

and then:

make flash-kernel

Flash the image

Flashing the image to the device is as simple as flashing the kernel to the device.

make IMAGE=~/path/to/your/kernel/shr-image.tar.gz flash-image

Same thing as for the kernel about grabbing the image for you.

Automatic installation

Needed things

• a computer with linux installed
• an active internet connection
• your device
• the webos doctor corresponding to your device (see  WebOS Internals' wiki)
• novacom,  and just novacom!

Your are now five steps away to the end :

1. Create a "downloads" directory and put in there the webos version you have downloaded, something like webosxxxxx.jar .
2. In our working directory (not in "downloads/" !), download the fso-installer (a Makefile  http://git.freesmartphone.org/?p=utilities.git;a=blob_plain;f=palmpre/fso-installer/Makefile;hb=HEAD )
3. You have then to modify only two things in the Makefile : TARGET and CONFIG_WEBOS_MEDIA_TARGET_SIZE as explained at the top of the Makefile
4. Plug your device to your computer with the usb cable and put it in developer mode(see  WebOS Internals' wiki).
5. Type:

   make install-all
   

At the end your device will reboot and you will have a new shiny multi-boot screen.

Update your installation

There are several ways to update your SHR distribution : a manual way , an automatic way and an opkg way.

The manual way

Reboot your device into 'flash' mode. ( and follow only the flash mode step)

Update the kernel

Updating a kernel is very simple. You just need to download or build a kernel for the device and update it with the following command to the device:

make KERNEL=~/path/to/your/kernel.bin update-kernel

If you don't want to have to provide a kernel then just use this command which will download the last unstable one:

make wget-kernel

and then:

make update-kernel

Update the image

Updating the image to the device is as simple as updating the kernel to the device.

make IMAGE=~/path/to/your/kernel/shr-image.tar.gz update-image

Same thing as for the kernel about grabbing the image for you.

Then reboot

make reboot

Note that you can independently update just the kernel or just the image

The automatic way

Attach your phone to your computer and reboot it normally to have the multiboot screen and then run the following command :

make update-all

That's all! It will do all the stuff for you and will then reboot your phone.

The opkg way

SHR uses  opkg a bit like Debian has dpkg so you can upgrade SHR directly from your phone in a terminal with theses two commands :

opkg update

opkg upgrade

But beware of the state of your distro. Currently the automatic targets of our makefile only provide SHR Unstable so the upgrade path is anything but warranted!!! But you can try :)

Usages

Specifics usages of SHR on Pre devices.

Otherwise take a look at the SHR user manual on the main page of this wiki

Status

We need to point a status page.