A quick heads up for Sprint Palm Pre owners rocking webOS 1.4.5. You know how many of us assumed Palm has delayed the rollout of webOS 1.4.5 to fix that well-known bug with PDK applications? Well, we were wrong. The bug which prevents games from saving progress and user data is still present. Before you gather together to lay siege to the new HP/Palm headquarters, read on for some context and a fix for this bug.
Ardent webOS owners are well-acquainted with the PDK bug that is present in webOS 1.4.5. The brouhaha concerning this bug came to light about a month ago when webOS 1.4.5 made its first debut in July on select European and Canadian carriers. Soon after the update hit handsets, a flaw in Palm’s implementation of its new PDK feature was uncovered. This unfortunate bug caused games to throw an error when they tried to save game progress data and personalized user information.
The problem lies with Palm’s OTA updating mechanism for webOS 1.4.5, which mistakenly does not update the key system file, /etc/fstab. While the rest of webOS is shiny and new, the /etc/fstab file remains its old and tarnished self. As a result, the /media/internal drive is marked as read-only and PDK applications, primarily games, are unable to save to this default storage location. To deal with this embarrassing oversight, Palm acknowledged this bug and stated that it would be fixed in a future version of webOS. Palm also encouraged developers with PDK applications to re-write their applications to use an alternative storage location.
In the month that has elapsed, Pre and Pixi owners still limping along on 1.4.1 have been wondering what happened to their coveted webOS 1.4.5 update. Despite what Palm said about not updating this PDK bug in 1.4.5, many assumed that Palm delayed the Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T release to address this troubling error. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a wrong assumption and the PDK error is still present.
Thankfully, the community of enthusiastic webOS developers from WebOS Internals released an application to fix this bug when it first surfaced in July. Called Emergency Fstab Fixer, this cleverly crafted application manually updates the /etc/fstab file and restores the proper permissioning to the /media/internal drive. Once you download Emergency Fstab Fixer from Preware and apply it to your handset, you will be able to enjoy error-free gaming on your webOS handset.
[via PreCentral]