WebOS is reborn in a live USB distro

Miss your Palm Pre or Pixi? Did you get one of those firesale Touchpads and wished that you could run WebOS on a different form factor? Those were the hopes when HP opened sourced the failed Palm operating system. It seems like the open source community is running with the code, though, and today a distribution of WebOS built on top of Ubuntu was released by Ping-Hsun Chen. We’ve already seen WebOS on the Galaxy Nexus and the Transformer Prime, but now you can run it on your computer by booting from USB.

As with all beta software, there could be significant bugs when you boot up. For instance, don’t count on kernel drivers working perfectly. Also, WebOS is merely running on top of Ubuntu, and there’s no access to the WebOS App Catalog or the homebrew alternatives. Still! WebOS, a operating system ahead of its time, is functioning on most x86 computers. HP thinks it has a future in kiosks, and there’s no reason you can’t try it out today.

To give the WebOS distro a spin, download it from here.

Kif Leswing
Categories: Cellphones, Gadgets
Tags: webos