Palm supplies Palm Pre owners with this wonderful recovery tool called the webOS Doctor. Â Part of the charter of the WebOS Internals project is to ensure that anything we (or anyone following instructions we publish or installing packages we develop) do can always be reverted using the webOS Doctor.
Usually, a Palm Pre is required to be activated on the Sprint network before it can be used. Â This is not possible for a Palm Pre in Australia.
So we need to allow the Pre to be used without activation, and there are a number of information sources showing how this can be done. Â There are also some dubious sites that redistribute modified versions of the webOS Doctor (which is a clear violation of copyright law, since it contains proprietary Palm software). Â Note that WebOS Internals is always careful to comply with all copyright laws (copyright law is the foundation upon which open source licenses are based).
So we need a way for a Pre owner (who has the right to use the webOS Doctor on their own Pre) to modify the webOS Doctor that is specific to their particular version of the Palm Pre before using it to flash that modified firmware onto their Pre.
That’s where the WebOS Internals “Meta-Doctor” comes into play.
I have created a tool which will download, unpack, patch, and repack a webOS Doctor image, applying a number of transformations along the way to:
- Bypass the need for activation
- Enable Palm Profile access
- Set developer mode on by default
- Increase the size of the /var partition to 2GB
You can find this tool in the WebOS Internals source code repository at https://github.com/webos-internals/meta-doctor
Do not redistribute modified versions of the webOS Doctor created using this tool – it is for end-user use only.
I’ve created a forum thread on PreCentral for discussion about this tool.