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Community Edition 3.1.0 - Touchpad WiFi - Final Release Candidate

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@codepoet80 codepoet80 released this 30 Aug 22:53
· 61 commits to main since this release
3.1.0-CE-FinalReleaseCandidate
900716d

webOS CE 3.1.0 — Release Notes

Final release candidate — BUILDMARK 600070 (2026-08-30)

TOPAZ WiFi only!

Download the pre-built jar from this release, and run as a normal Doctor. See the README for more detailed installation instructions.
Asset webosdoctorp310hstnh-ce-600070-frc.jar
Size 242,920,348 bytes (232 MB)
sha256 392f2122e3bd95f6f6b4f89acff2e8038508746a6fdeac7f4c5716834178e65a
md5 d804b15312428e29172e27a17a7493f1

Verify before flashing:

sha256sum webosdoctorp310hstnh-ce-600070-frc.jar

(RC3 was 600067; RC2 was 600056, sha256 cea207df…; RC1 was 600024.)

What's in it

Modern TLS everywhere. OpenSSL 1.1.1w stacks for the browser, app WebKit, download manager and mail, so HTTPS sites and mail servers work again. Current Mozilla root certificates (190), with expired ones dropped.

LunaCE launcher — app groups, tabs, wave launcher, gestures, and a smaller default keyboard. LunaCE's Tweaks definitions ship pre-seeded (inert until you install Tweaks from Preware).

Community sign-in. First-use runs the webOS Archive account flow instead of HP's dead activation servers, and account setup is skippable.

Pre-installed, baked into the image — no first-boot installs, no postinsts:
Preware 1.9.19, Govnah 1.3.9, App Catalog 6.1.2923, Maps 4.0.1, USB Settings, BT Gamepad support, and the Synergy Revival shared runtime. Preware knows they are installed and offers Preware feeds out of the box.

Community core apps — Accounts 3.1.1 (with a Synergy Accounts grouping and a Delete Account Data page), Contacts, Messaging, Phone, and the supporting frameworks.

Synergy Revival — the modernised libpurple 2.14 IM runtime, with the dead Skype / Yahoo / legacy-Google stacks retired.

Hardware and platform fixes — UberKernel 3.0.5-93, Bluetooth gamepads and mice, USB OTG/power/mass-storage, Bluetooth hands-free, extra media codecs (opus/ogg/vpx/matroska/speex), a slim Thai font, and working connectivity detection (the old check pointed at dead HP servers and demanded a hotspot login on ordinary Wi-Fi).

Identity — Device Info reports webOS CE 3.1.0, and apps see a clean 3.1.0 platform version. Developer mode is on out of the box and stays on.

Removed — Kindle, Facebook and YouTube preloads.

New in 600070

Two additions on top of RC3, both small on purpose — the rootfs is frozen for the life of the release, so late changes were limited to what could be fully verified.

Device Info no longer says "HP webOS Account". There is no HP account in CE — first use creates a webOS Archive community account — so the heading over the account row, and the same phrase in the full-erase confirmation, named something that does not exist. Both now read "webOS Account", in all five shipped languages (webOS-Konto, Compte webOS, Cuenta de webOS, Account webOS).

A signing key for future updates is now in the image. This is the only over-the-air component here, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not.

What shipped: a public key and a small signature verifier. That is all.

What did not ship: any update client. Nothing checks for updates, nothing contacts a server, and nothing on the device will install anything on its own. There is no update to fetch yet.

Why it is here at all, given the client is not: a trust root cannot be delivered over the channel it exists to protect. If the key arrived in a future update, that update would itself be unauthenticated — which is the exact problem the key is meant to solve. So the key has to be in the image you flash, or it is worth nothing. Everything else can come later, over Preware, authenticated by this key.

The verifier deliberately uses the device's original 2009 OpenSSL rather than the modern TLS stack CE adds, so it works identically on stock webOS 3.0.5 and on CE — a device does not need the modern crypto it might be installing in order to check the signature on it.

New in RC3 (600067)

The power menu's Shut Down actually shuts down. It rebooted instead, on every CE build since 600011. /sbin/halt and /sbin/poweroff are symlinks to /sbin/reboot, which picks its action from basename(argv[0]); a diagnostic shim wrapped around that name could not preserve argv[0], so every power-off — the menu, and critical-battery shutdown — came back as a reboot. The shim is gone and the test suite now asserts those four names stay unwrapped.

Preware's package service no longer loses its upstart job. Two separate faults, both fixed in Preware itself and rebuilt from source for this image:

  • Its postinst copied the upstart job into the watched directory, so upstart could read it half-written and end up with no valid job — Preware then had no backend until you rebooted. It now writes to a temp path and renames it in.
  • Its service returned success when it could not take the D-Bus name, which upstart read as a clean exit and respawned instantly — eleven times in a second, tripping the respawn limit and parking the job. Preware kept answering, so this hid for years, but a Luna Restart in that state can freeze the device. It now pauses and exits non-zero, so a name conflict is a paced retry.

A half-wiped app store is now repaired instead of hanging the boot. If the Doctor's app-deletion stage hits a read-only /media/internal — a dirty VFAT volume, typically after a force-reboot into recovery — it fails every removal, reports the flash successful anyway, and the device boots with no app store. Every preload then fails and retries forever on the pulsing logo. First boot now rebuilds that directory and says so in the log.

Backup and Restore 3.1.1. Three fixes:

  • Restores no longer read the wrong manifest. The on-device cache was reconciled by name, and names are not unique — a stale manifest from an earlier restore could shadow the real one, which once turned a 115-package restore into six files and reported success. The target is now the source of truth for content.
  • Scheduled backups no longer grow without bound. Each run re-archived every app and tar czf stamps the creation time into the gzip header, so byte-identical content hashed differently every time and the content-addressed store kept a full copy per run. Measured on a real device: six copies of one 295 MB game across four days, /media/internal at 100%, backups then failing with ENOSPC. Verified fixed: a repeat backup covering 1.6 GB added 3 MB. Upgrading costs one large backup — the copies already in your store were written by the old code and cannot be matched, so the first backup after updating stores everything once more. Every run after that is small.
  • A failed backup no longer leaks. Files are stored as the run goes and the manifest is written last, so a run that died left full-size files nothing referenced — and only the success path purged.

Local media opens in the media apps again — with Atlas 0.9.12, released alongside. Atlas claimed every file:// URL, which outranks mime and extension handlers, so photos, videos and music opened in the browser.

New in RC2 (600056)

Backup and Restore actually works. The stock Backup app was a UI over Palm's retired servers; it is replaced by an on-device backup writing content-addressed backups to /media/internal/webos-backups, and it is the supported way to carry data from webOS 3.0.5 onto CE. Verified end to end: a 115-package backup from a 3.0.5 device restored onto CE with 102 apps reinstalled and none failed, all 11 of their services registered and reachable on the bus after the reboot, and a receipt naming everything it could not put back and why.

Accounts — the Settings → Accounts list shows a single SYNERGY ACCOUNTS group again, rather than groups nested inside a group.

A boot-time crash is gone. On a Wi-Fi TouchPad the stock WAN daemon respawn-thrashed until upstart stopped it, and jobs starting in that same moment died with SIGSEGV. Harmless in effect, but it produced a crash report on every boot and every Luna Restart.

Preware reports CE's baked packages honestly, including the TLS and root-certificate updates, so it no longer offers them as fresh installs and a 3.0.5 restore no longer copies their leftovers onto the device.

How this build was tested

90 automated checks, 0 failures — on two different TouchPads, each a separate flash. The suite covers identity, first-boot seeding, the core apps, the Synergy runtime, Preware's package state, Exhibition, search, storage and both additions above.

7 consecutive reboots, 112 checks, 0 failures. Five minutes of running time after each boot, then the full check set. This exists because the fault that dogged RC2 fired roughly one boot in six, so a single clean boot proves very little.

Setup in three languages — English, plus a German factory reset and a French (Canada) fresh flash, both returning a correct device.

A 43-package backup restored onto the flashed image with zero errors and nothing skipped; after the reboot all 11 restored services were reachable, including apps whose own services came back with them.

Not covered, and tracked rather than claimed: Bluetooth pairing, an IM account actually connecting, and the Exhibition clock faces.

Known issues

Full detail, with evidence and what a fix would have to do, is in KNOWN-ISSUES.md. The ones a tester will actually meet:

  • Preware may not work until you reboot once after setup. Fixed in RC3 — both causes fixed in Preware itself, and this build saw no occurrence across two flashes and seven reboots. No post-setup reboot is needed any more.
  • A crash report may appear after first-time setup — see the top of this note. Cosmetic; nothing is lost.
  • Restoring a backup taken on another device? The cause is fixed in RC3 (the cache is now reconciled on content, not on name), but a genuine cross-device collision has not yet been restored through on hardware, so the workaround in BACKUP-RESTORE.md stands until it has.
  • No post-setup account manager yet. The sign-in app is first-use only in this build; managing your account afterwards will come as a separate App Catalog app.
  • No over-the-air updates yet. The image carries the key that will authenticate them, and nothing else. Updates will arrive through Preware when the client is ready.
  • No on-device rollback. Recovery is re-Doctoring — by design.

Notes for testers

  • The Doctor is unsigned and the OEM flash gate is patched off, so your Java runtime may warn about the missing signature.
  • The first boot does housekeeping for about 90 seconds after setup completes (seeding the IM runtime and Preware's feeds). If the IM transport or Preware feeds look absent immediately after setup, give it a minute.
  • Logs worth capturing for any report: /var/log/messages and /var/log/ce-*.log. (/var/log/reboot-tripwire.log is gone: the tripwire that wrote it was retired after it was found to turn every power-off into a reboot.)
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