How to install Palm Pre/webOS SDK on Windows 7 x64?

July 20, 2009 – 5:21 am Tags: Tools

Note: latest versions of webOS SDK should install without problems on Win 7 x64. However you are free to try this if you encounter problems with it.

Palm has recently released the Palm Pre webOS SDK to the public. Installing it on Windows 7 64-bit is a bit problematic however.

When attempting to install it, the setup runs through fine at first, but then does a rollback of everything. Palm says it’s working on a solution, but in the meantime, here’s an easy way to fix it!

Step 1: Required downloads

Obviously, you need the Pre Mojo SDK from Palm’s site. Additional things that you need are:

• Java, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors to be sure
• VirtualBox
• Orca, a tool from Windows SDK to edit Microsoft Installer packages

Step 2: Install, part 1

Install everything listed in step 1, except the SDK itself.

After this, open command prompt and type in java -version

This should output Java’s version. If it does not, reboot your PC which should solve it. If it still does not after rebooting, confirm you installed the 64-bit Java package properly.

Step 3: Fixing SDK installer

The SDK installation fails because it tries to install an update to the Windows User Mode Driver Framework. To make the installer work, we must use Orca to modify the file so it won’t attempt installing the update - which itself is completely unnecessary.

Before doing anything else, open the Temp directory. You can easily do this by hitting Win+R, and typing in %TEMP%

The SDK installer will extract some files in a directory in temp. We need one of the files it extracts, called Palm SDK.msi. You can change the sorting of the directory to date, so that you can easily see which directory the installer creates. The directory might be called {####-####-####}, where the # are numbers or letters.

Now, launch the SDK installer. Keep an eye on the temp directory, and you should see a new directory popping up. If not, the old temp files from the installer were still there. In this case, you’ll have to look for the directory with the Palm SDK.msi file in it.

When you find the file, copy it to the same directory where you have the installer you downloaded. You can now cancel the SDK installation.

Next, right click the Palm SDK.msi file and choose “Edit with Orca”. In Orca’s left side panel, find and click on “InstallExecuteSequence”. Now, in the right panel find installumdf.08B8BE2B_9174_49D1_84B0_40324FD7DE34 - it’s probably near the bottom of the list. Right click it, and choose “Drop Row”.

Now hit save and close Orca.

Step 4: Install, part 2

Install Palm webOS SDK by running your edited Palm SDK.msi.

Almost done! The final thing you may encounter is the Palm Emulator saying you don’t have VirtualBox installed. To fix this, go to the directory where you installed the SDK, into the bin directory. There you will find the Palm Emulator .exe file and a .bat file called palm-emulator.bat. Launching the emulator with the .bat file should work, so just modify the shortcuts to point to that instead of the .exe

Credits

The information here was pieced together from many posts in webOSdev forums and the Live Runway blog.

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