Something one learns quickly about the homebrew scene for Palm’s smartphones is that it is very active and very innovative. That legacy continued this week as a group of developers released a video demonstrating OpenOffice and other Linux applications running on webOS, the operating system behind the Pre and the Pixi smartphones.
Technically speaking, webOS’ core components are not all that dissimilar to mainstream Linux distros, such as Ubuntu. Beneath the slick GUI, webOS employs the Linux kernel, Upstart for startup apps, GStreamer for multimedia, libpurple for IM, Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for game programming, PulseAudio for audio management and WebKit for browsing.
That foundation has made it especially easy to develop dozens upon dozens of mods that can add an incredible number of new and useful features to Palm devices. The penguin-y heart also makes the Pre a viable platform for the fvwm window manager, which developers like dtzWill, zonyl, somiaj and thomas_adam used in a collaborative effort to get OpenOffice running as demonstrated in the following video.
The developers caution, however, that OpenOffice on the Pre is merely a proof of concept; a demonstration that webOS is more like a PC than many probably imagine. The warning is well-deserved, too, as loading OpenOffice takes more than 90 seconds on the 500MHz handset.
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