Coyote Tracks

Last week, I wrote that I’d been working on a script to easily install homebrew apps on the Palm Prē. It now looks like there are much better ways to handle such things — I’ve become quite a fan of fileCoaster, myself, and of course webOSQuickInstall is a wonderful piece of work, as well. But just in case anyone might find this shell script useful, I’ll release it for general use.

Assumptions

1. You have a web-accessible server where you put your development .ipk files.
2. You can ssh into your Prē.

Download

You can download the script at http://kai.mactane.org/software/libraries/download/homebrew.sh.

Installation

Just drop the shell script into your home directory and make it executable. If you want to be able to use the “my” argument, you’ll also need to edit the three configuration variables at the beginning: MY_HOSTNAME, STDPATH, and STDVERSION.

Usage

For most purposes, you’ll just want to install your own package that you’ve been working on. Assuming you’ve set the config variables correctly, you can just type ./homebrew.sh my appname, where the appname is the base name of your package.

If you’re installing multiple .ipks and you don’t need to restart the GUI manager for each one, you can use the “skip” command on all but the last:

./homebrew.sh skip my foo
./homebrew.sh skip my bar
./homebrew.sh skip my baz
./homebrew.sh my quux


You can also supply a complete URL: ./homebrew.sh http://forums.precentral.net/spe_attachment/download-23971-com.palm.net.precoder.fcoaster_1.0.2_all.ipk will download and install fileCoaster, so you won’t have to mess with my script any more.

What It Does

It automates the process of installing homebrew apps with a rooted Prē, as described on the webOS Internals wiki. Basically, it remounts the root partition in read-write mode, wgets your .ipk file, installs it, does the “Good Housekeeping” backup, remounts the root partition in read-only mode again, and then restarts the GUI manager.