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After a week of hacking, I finally convinced my Treo 650 to boot linux.

I have a page registered on handhelds.org where I’ll be collecting information once I get a bit further. I’ll try to have something available so more people can have a go at it.

To answer some of the questions people have had:

  • Will the GSM radio work? Answer: Yep! The GSM radio is connected to a UART on the processor. You activate/dial it using GSM AT commands. There’s a couple of pins you need to activate to bring it up, but it won’t be hard to narrow them down.

  • Can I load it without destroying my phone? Answer: Yes. The current method for loading it uses the phone’s bootloader to place it in RAM. It doesn’t write any permanent data to the phone yet, and it’ll only be using the SD card for read/write operations anyways.

UPDATE

  • Will the CDMA radio work? Answer: Hopefully. Shadowmite pointed out that the CDMA radio uses AT commands as well. This means that a single phone program might be able to provide both GSM and CDMA service!

UPDATE

Welcome Slashdot, Digg, Engadget and other readers!

I’ve got to give credit to 1&1 hosting for holding up under a simultaneous Slashdot/Digg attack.

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