Palm’s webOS installed and running on old Dell laptop

David Gonzales  By on 17 May 10

Old used laptops are usually paired with old operating systems like Windows XP or some GNU/Linux variant. But for those of you who want to try out something completely different, check out Palm’s webOS.

No, I have not gone crazy or fallen victim to a typo of some sort. Palm’s mobile operating system on the Pre and Pixi has been found to be capable of running on an old Dell laptop. See the image below for some introductory proof.

And it doesn’t take a genius to make this magic trick work, either. Apparently, it’s as easy as taking the webOS emulator for the PC (which is compatible with x86 hardware) and using its image to install webOS on a hard drive. The person responsible for installing webOS on the above pictured Dell laptop used the webOS image on an IDE hard drive.

As you can imagine, webOS on the laptop works just like it does on Palm’s recent smartphones, but problems arise from the input options offered by the keyboard and non-touchscreen display. So even though installing the mobile OS on the laptop is somewhat easy, things can only get tricky when it comes to actual usage.

Whether or not something good comes out of this hack remains to be seen. It may help you pass the time on a weekend, though.

Via PreCentral

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  • brotherred

    WebOS is built on the Linux kernel and GNU libraries just as any functional Linux kernel is. Every person watching the GNU+Linux or embedded OS landscapes knows that.

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