The text retrieval information was very insightful, thank you for posting this. I had the first generation Palm Pre about two years ago and I remember that there was a 3rd party Terminal application that allowed you to play around in CLI on the phone itself. One could also install and use ssh on the phone- very cool. The phone had a lot of potential running on Linux, but like you mentioned, the limited resources bring some weak performance (although I hear the later generation phones were beefed up a bit). I sold mine after 6 months of sub-par performance and went back to my 10 year old Samsung clamshell :) Jeremy MountainJohnson jeremy.mountainjohnson at gmail.com On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >