I was playing with some Linux images on my HTC Universal (aka Xda Exec, Jasjar, etc), when I realized that most of them sucked.

I built my own GPE image using OpenEmbedded, It’s based on the Angstrom distribution so there’s a package manager (ipkg) with plenty of apps ready to try out, pretty cool. Wifi in this image seems far more stable than any other image I’ve tried.

GPE has one of the best mobile browsers I’ve ever used, and some excellent PIM apps, but seems to lack an app for making use of phone functionality.

I’m currently investigating adding support to Conduit for syncing GPE devices.

What works:

• Touch screen
• Wifi
• Keyboard (although the map is a bit out)
• Suspend/Resume
• Sound
• Screen rotation using the panel applet

What doesn’t:

• Battery applet
• Wifi applet (network config tool works fine though)
• Phone/SMS capability
• Starling Audio Player (segfaults)
• su - when logged in as a normal user - “chmod u+s /bin/su” as root to fix.

How to install:

• Find a SD card (I used a 1GB card) and create two partitions; a ext2 partition and a swap partition; make sure the ext2 partition is first. I recommend making the swap partition 256mb.
• Extract the rootsfs onto the ext2 partition.
• Copy these files onto your Universal, these are needed to boot Linux.  Make sure they are kept together.

To run Linux, just start haret.  Feedback much appreciated.