WebOS 2.1 - Give It a Spin with Emulation Through the WebOS SDK!

Ross Larson — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

It seems like only yesterday that Palm announced its brand new Linux-based WebOS and Palm Pre, ready to shake up the world with awesomeness and Linux in a little package. They matched that announcement up with a nifty little SDK that emulated the entire OS in VirtualBox, and was released as a .deb package for Ubuntu. Someone even posted a HOWTO on the Linux Journal web site about it!

Wait... that wasn't yesterday? It was over two years ago?

Palm has since been sold to HP, you say?

Oh, excuse me. Sorry about that. It seems that the only constant in this world is change.

The last two years haven't exactly been rainbows and sunshine for the WebOS, economically speaking, but the HP acquisition of Palm appears to have given the WebOS project a breath of fresh air. They've announced a new version- WebOS 2.1, which includes native support for node.js, and some other cool developer features, such as "Exhibition Mode". Léo Apotheker, HP's new CEO, claims that their goals for WebOS are to be sold on 100 million devices a year and be included in every HP PC by 2012. Those are ambitious goals, so wouldn't it be nice to get to kick the tires of the OS that will be prevalent in (HP) tablets, smart phones, PCs, and printers soon?

Guess what? You're in luck. An emulated version of WebOS is available in the WebOS 2.1 SDK. The SDK still runs by using the VirtualBox emulator and allows you to kick the tires of the newest version of the OS, allowing you to see if it's truly ready for prime-time.

Interested? OK, let's do this.

(This HOWTO assumes that you have a Linux system that can install Ubuntu .deb packages. If you would like something other than .deb files to be available for Linux installs, I'd suggest contacting Palm at pdc@palm.com to request them to release other versions, either now, or in the future. Currently, the .deb package appears to be the only officially distributed version.)

Step 1: Sign up for a Palm Developer Account at https://developer.palm.com/ (Alternatively, head directly to the Ubuntu SDK download page here.)

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