Cameron's Thoughts

The latest version of WebOS came out today, and the third big update since the Palm Pre came out. I'm about to download it here shortly. Precentral has details of what's included in the update. I have been using Preware to install patches to my phone, so this update also means it's time to remove those patches, and then reinstall after the update. For my own personal note-taking and to share what I have installed, here are the current patches:

4x4 icons v3
Call Block/Rejector
Call Duration in Call Log
Character Counter
Default to Month View
Enable Add/Delete Pages
Enable Forwarding
Enable Landscape Email
Enable Vibration
Hide Nascar App
Hide NFL App
Just Charge By Default
Lower Swap Threshold
Match State to Area Code
Reduce Minimum Brightness
Show Wifi SSID
Sound Toggle - Grey
Unhide Dev Mode Icon
Unthrottle Download Manager
Virtual Keyboard

A lot of this stuff is indeed included in other phones by default, and I will admit that webOS is lacking in some features. Thankfully, the hacking community is really great and they have made the phone very nice.

Also, anyone running Preware should probably make the following modification to the phone. This will stop updates from occurring automatically. It's possible that you could really mess up the phone if you install an OS update over all the patches, so it's best to have control over the updates instead of letting Palm do them automatically. What this does is simply remove the execute ability from the update application. You need to have root access to do this. Once you are logged on as root, run the following:

mount -o remount,rw /
chmod -x /usr/bin/UpdateDaemon
mount -o remount,ro /
killall UpdateDaemon

Then, on days like today when once you've removed all the patches, you can reverse this and re-enable the updater by doing the following:

mount -o remount,rw /
chmod +x /usr/bin/UpdateDaemon
mount -o remount,ro /

Then restart the phone.