Turning smartphones like the Palm Pre into webservers is a time-honored tradition. A smartphone isn't a smartphone until it's been "legitimized" by some enterprising white-hat hacker making it serve web pages.
Nebula wrote in to say he's done just that and posted his results in the Pre Dev Wiki. To get it done, he loaded Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Net-SNMP onto the device to turn it into a traditional LAMP setup (That's Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP, Python, or Perl). Nebula even went to far as to install the Network Monitoring System Cacti.
Palm may have put a crimp on the Homebrew scene with their (necessary) security fix, but it's clear that the webOS platform and its linux core is robust enough and open enough to allow for all sorts of fun projects like this.
Speaking of Homebrew, there's some promising signs on that front -- check out xorg's "Pinging the Collective for a New Mission" to get some preliminary details and learn how you can help!
Comments
dam, I love it.
I know you're talking American, but what the heck does all that mean? Will it make it easier for me to download and play High School Musical 3?!
epic fail @ talking American
Very interesting! What's the true utility of this? Does the phone have an IP address that can actually be accessed by browsers on different devices?
Correct. Basically think of it this way. You can carry around a webserver in your pocket. Your Palm Pre can obtain 2 concurrent IPs, one for the WiFi adapter and one for the EVDO chip. The EVDO IP changes everytime you log on or off the network so you'd probably want to set up some dynamic dns (there is a solution in the forums of how to do this).
When that is done, you can access your phone from anywhere in the world with a pretty stable connection. Now, this article is showing you how to create a webserver on your phone so you can serve web pages from it over a port of your choosing.
How is this useful?
Well, you don't have to pay for hosting fees from godaddy!
You can take it with you!
You can create services to serve media aggregated on your phone!
All kinds of cool ideas. Just think of it as your own lil godaddy in your phone, that you can write your web services on.
(FYI, not a big fan of GoDaddy, just saying them because most people know who they are).
Now here is my big kicker, homebrew web apps, connecting to web services hosted on the local server and/or other Pre phones. You could create a 'mesh network' overlay of sorts as a platform for a multiuser application. Just some random thoughts floating around.
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