My cell phone, a Palm Pre, has Linux under the hood. Maybe I always knew that, but I wasn't thinking about it much until I wanted to get my old text messages off the phone. Then I had to follow the procedure in the right pane here: http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Portal:Accessing_Linux That leads you here, where there are quite a few steps to follow: http://developer.palm.com/index.php?id=1788 After that, I connect the phone to the Ubuntu box and run "novaterm" in an xterm window. This gives me a bash prompt on the Palm Pre. root at palm-webos-device:/# set DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS='unix:path=/tmp/session_bus_socket' DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS='unix:path=/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket' EDITOR='/bin/vi' HISTFILE='/tmp/.ash_history12372' IFS=' ' OPTIND='1' PATH='/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:' PPID='1004' PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ ' PS2='> ' PS4='+ ' PWD='/' TERM='vt100' TZ=':/var/luna/preferences/localtime' UPSTART_STARTTIME='2.580910644' _='echo' It's a little limited but it is pretty cool to work in a Linux environment inside my cell phone. I guess we want it to be limited because we need all the RAM and flash memory space we can get. There are no man pages, but there are a lot of programs in the path and bash does filename completion and command history. So it's pretty comfortable to use. Next I copied the database file containing SMS messages to a location where I can access it using the phone as a USB drive: cp -p /var/luna/data/dbdata/PalmDatabase.db3 /media/internal It has md5sum, so I can check that the copies are identical. Then I exit the session, unplug the device and plug it back in, but this time I choose USB-drive mode. Now I can copy the db file to my Linux box, check the md5sum, and run these programs to get all of my text messages: http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Tutorials_Export_Text_Messages_Using_Perl I got some of the ideas from here: http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre/187145-how-back-up-text-messages-when-exchanging-phones.html Mike