Palm Pre Dances Nicely with Linux
By: Paul Ferrill
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 12:28:47 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6791/1/
That Syncing Feeling
Palm Pre Music Player
Summer releases of the latest smart phones from Apple, Blackberry, Google and Palm have excited geeks all over the world. The big question on the mind of Linux users has to be "Can I sync my Linux machine and my cool new phone?" We decided to find the answers specifically for the new Palm Pre.
Smart phones offer the ultimate combination of multiple gadgets like an MP3 player, PDA, camera and, of course, the cell phone. Apple set the standard high with the introduction of the original iPhone and has continued to improve on the original theme with new versions each year. This
Palm was all but given up for dead with the majority of its market share taken by Blackberries, Windows Mobile phones and the iPhone. With the introduction of the Palm Pre at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Palm gave notice that the writing of their obituary was a little premature. The Palm Pre comes with an all new operating system based on Linux with an innovative user interface unlike anything else on the market. Linux makes it possible for the Pre to multitask and to leverage the work of the Linux community for application development.
Music
One of the things Apple did really well with the iPhone was to take the basic music features of their iPod family and expand the platform with a camera, an on-screen keyboard and a high-speed data connection for things like browsing the Web, e-mail and more. Users familiar with using an iPod and iTunes to manage their audio library would feel right at home with the user interface.
As the Palm Pre neared its release date the word got out about the ability to sync with either a PC or Mac using iTunes. That's all well and good unless you happen to be a Linux user. Fortunately, there are options that work quite well on most mainstream Linux distributions. Rhythmbox is the default music player for Ubuntu, and it recognizes the Palm Pre as a music device.
Connecting to Linux
We were able to sync music between our Ubuntu desktop and the Palm Pre although we did experience a few problems. There is a known issue when syncing music between a Palm Pre that has already been synced with another machine running iTunes, causing some albums / songs to not show up on the Pre. Workarounds can be found in the Palm Pre forums on precentral.net although we were not able to get them to work in our case.
What did work in all cases is to simply connect the Palm Pre to the Linux desktop in USB mode and copy the music files to a directory on the device. The Pre's music player does a search for audio files when it starts up and found the files we copied over with no issues. We used this method to copy over podcasts as well as a variety of music files. The Pre does not support Windows Media format files (WMA), so you'll need to convert them to MP3 before copying them over.
Taking Photos, Application Development
Taking photos with the Palm Pre's 3-megapixel camera is a breeze, and the LED flash makes it possible to get decent pictures even in low light. Syncing the photos on your Pre with a desktop application such as F-Spot on Ubuntu works flawlessly. In fact, Ubuntu will even offer to do that automatically for you every time you connect the Pre to your Linux desktop. It makes the same offer for music files as well, using Rhythmbox or whichever application you have set as the default music player.
Browsing Photos With F-Spot
All pictures are stored in the typical DCIM directory and are visible using a file browser such as Nautilus under Ubuntu. You can transfer the photos off manually using the same method and delete the ones you don't want to keep. Other directories on the Pre include ringtones and wallpapers. You can create your own ringtones with an audio editor such as Audacity and copy them to the ringtones directory for later use. Wallpaper images need to be 320 pixels wide by 480 pixels high to fit the screen.
Grab a screen shot of the Pre's primary screen by holding down the Shift key, Orange function key and the P key. This places a copy of the screen in JPEG format in the screencaptures directory. These are easily accessible with the Pre connected in USB mode.
Gnome Music Player
Application Development
Developing for the Palm Pre at this point in time requires admission to the Palm SDK early access program. The basics of application development will include using HTML and Javascript with the addition of a
Current versions of the Palm Pre SDK require either a Windows-based machine or a Mac for the various pieces to run. Sun's Virtualbox tool is used to host the emulator, and Apple's Safari is required for the HTML engine. Eclipse is the most logical choice for Javascript development, and it runs just fine on essentially every Linux distribution. It remains to be seen if Palm will release the SDK for Linux in a future version.
Bottom Line
Overall, the experience of managing your media files on the Palm Pre from Linux is not that bad for a version 1 product. There are workarounds for any issues, and Linux offers a great platform for converting all those WMA audio files you have lying around on your old Windows machine. A quick Google search for Lame and other Linux audio conversion tools will save you lots of time and money.