How to get access to HP Touchpad homebrew applications, patches and kernels.
- September 2nd, 2011
- Posted in Documentation
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First, just a few comments about webos. Webos is a good mobile OS. It has/had (depends on how you look at it) the potential to be the best mobile OS out there. The basic operation is much better than any other mobile OS I have experienced, including IOS and Android. It is easily the best web browsing experience I have had on a smaller screen device. Great for a tablet form factor. However, it seems to me that it has fallen behind the other major players. It just feels like it is really close to being great, if it only got the attention it deserves. It needs a number of patches and bug fixes to address issues. It needs a chance to mature more. It should have matured quicker than it has thus far.
Note: This is the procedure I used get Preware installed by connecting my HP Touchpad to MacOS computer running Lion. I suspect that procedure is very similar in Windows, however I bet the novacom drivers installed without needing a workaround as outlined below.
Install Preware:
Connect Touchpad to your computer using the micro USB cable provided with Touchpad. Do NOT choose mount as USB device.
Download and launch WebOS Quick Install, which I downloaded from here:
http://forums.precentral.net/canuck-coding/274461-webos-quick-install-v4-0-a.html
If you get an error installing the novacom drivers, open terminal and enter the following to start the daemon:
sudo /opt/nova/bin/novacomd
Then, WebOS Quick Install should detect your device.
Click on the globe icon to download the list of homebrew applications, etc..
Select and install Preware.
This will put a Preware icon under Downloads on your Touchpad.
Launch Preware to install patches to help improve performance:
I installed the following as recommend by the following post on the PreCentral website:
Make It So
Muffle System Logging
Remove Dropped Packet Logging
Unset CFQ IO Scheduler
Unthrottle Download Manager
Quiet powerd Messages
Faster Card Animations HYPER Version
Increase Touch Sensitivity And Smoothness 10
Max Blocker
Private Browsing
Applying these patches to my 3.0.2 upgraded HP Touchpad helped to make it run much more smoothly. I wish I could say the same for the UberKernel and overclocking to 1.5GHZ, but that is for another day when I make another attempt.
Update: I did make another attempt at overclocking to 1.5GHz. It seems to be working better, but I am not sure that it is as significant any improvement as I have heard others proclaim. Applications do seem to open a little faster. Nonetheless, I am going to leave it for now.
Need help, I am using XP, I was earlier able to connect only once and install preware, after that quick install is not recognizing my device. I have done a entire full erase on my touchpad as well. Need your help! I think Novacom drivers are not being properly installed
@Imran J.
Since the Novacom drivers come from the WebOSQuickInstall, I would suspect that this is an issue with java. You should have at least java version 1.6 installed before running the WebOSQuickInstall jar file.
my tablet is so slow
@greg
I would first make sure you have the latest webOS update installed. Also, I would install the Preware, and make sure you have “Muffle System Logging” installed. You could install the Uberkernel installed to overclock to 1.5GHz, but I did not find that to make much usable difference. Doing that I found mine, while not a rocket, very usable.