After a week of hacking, I finally convinced my Treo 650 to boot linux.
I’ve uploaded the pictures to a page for all to see.
I have a page registered on handhelds.org where I’ll be collecting information once I get a bit further. I’ll try to have something available so more people can have a go at it.
To answer some of the questions people have had:
1. Will the GSM radio work? Answer: Yep! The GSM radio is connected to a UART on the processor. You activate/dial it using GSM AT commands. There’s a couple of pins you need to activate to bring it up, but it won’t be hard to narrow them down.
2. Can I load it without destroying my phone? Answer: Yes. The current method for loading it uses the phone’s bootloader to place it in RAM. It doesn’t write any permanent data to the phone yet, and it’ll only be using the SD card for read/write operations anyways.
UPDATE
3. Will the CDMA radio work? Answer: Hopefully. Shadowmite pointed out that the CDMA radio uses AT commands as well. This means that a single phone program might be able to provide both GSM and CDMA service!
UPDATE
Welcome Slashdot, Digg, Engadget and other readers! The pictures are linked above, but I’ll link to them again if it’s not entirely obvious.
I’ve got to give credit to 1&1 hosting for holding up under a simultaneous Slashdot/Digg attack. :)
Matthew, glad to see your efforts. Will be glad to see you on hackndev.com, where TT3 and LifeDrive developers communicate.
I also would like to work a bit on Treo 650 wiki which you have created recently on handhelds.org, in order to make it look more like other Plams pages. Do you mind ?
Best regards,
A.
P.S. Please answer by e-mail, if possible.
This is great news! Opensource for my Treo!
Congratulations and great work.
This is all sorts of wonderful. I’ve had my 650 for all of a month, and, like the 600 before it, kept thinking that the Treo platform was ripe for Linux.
Put up a paypal button and I’ll donate.
Nice, hurry up and get it out there for everyone to use!
Hey now that we can get Linux to run, any chance Windows Mobile? Maybe once the Treo 700w is released, you can get it to run on the 600 and 650. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that would be AWSOME.
BADASS!
Good work my friend.
just posted on one of our blogs, can you go into more detail on HOW it was done???
Where is the handheld.org page - this will be updated on
Great work! I want linux on my sprint 6700!!!
yeah, some sort of detailed explination of how ya got there would help, I (and i imagine others) could definitely help in testing, and other areas.. Specifically i have some experience with bluetooth on linux and could probably get it to the point where you could ssh in over bluetooth assuming the bluetooth adapter is properly supported..
-sp
sp: Send me an email (matthew at mastracci dot com) and we can talk about getting that up and running.
I’d actually prefer to get it working now, since that means I don’t have to make a serial cable. :D
I’d recommend USB-net rather than bluetooth. It’s a lot more stable on the arm kernel.
hei,man,u r so crazy,but that is a great work! Good work my friend!
Wiki for Treo 650 on handhelds.org: http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/PalmTreo650
There are also links to other PDAs projects, including several Palms: http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/SupportedHandheldSummary
Well done, congratulations and thanks.
I just might be willing to trade in my Zaurus for a 650 once this becomes mature …. or perhaps use both at the same time :) Dual headed commuting.