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PsionLX for the Psion Teklogix netBook Pro
A reconstruction of Psion's unreleased Linux operating system
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Release date 30 September 2026
For Psion Teklogix netBook Pro (and netBook Pro only)
Licence See LICENCE-AND-CREDITS section at the end of this file
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WHAT THIS IS
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Around 2004-2005, Psion Teklogix built a Linux operating system for the
netBook Pro called PsionLX. It never shipped. A handful of prototype
machines had it; a developer image circulated privately; and the two copies
that were ever uploaded to the public internet were both posted to file
hosts that have since died without being archived.
What survived is Psion's *source*: their OpenEmbedded build tree, their
patches, their artwork, their configuration, and one kernel built on their
own build server. Not the finished image.
This is a rebuild of that finished image from the surviving source. It boots
from a CompactFlash card on a real netBook Pro, and it puts Psion's own
interface, theme, configuration and applications on top of the GPE root
filesystem that is known to run on this hardware.
It is *not* the lost soho image. Where Psion's originals did not survive --
the launcher, the button bar, the desktop background -- they have been
rebuilt from upstream code and measured against Psion's own photographs.
Everything is labelled: PROVENANCE.txt records the origin of every single
file, including what is genuinely Psion's and what is a reconstruction.
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READ THIS BEFORE YOU BOOT ANYTHING
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*** The netBook Pro can be left unable to boot Windows CE. ***
The machine has 32 MB of internal NAND flash holding Windows CE. Some
BooSt scripts that circulate for this device erase and repartition that
NAND. One widely copied script uses the value 7e8, which is correct for
the 64 MB LX prototype and WRONG for a standard 32 MB machine -- it
swallows the whole chip and leaves CE unable to reinstall.
That has already happened once during this project, to a real machine.
This release is built so it cannot happen to you:
* The CF images here DO NOT TOUCH THE NAND. They boot entirely from
the card. Windows CE stays exactly where it is, and you go back to
it by taking the card out.
* Any image or script that does touch NAND has been left out of this
release, or is clearly marked. In particular:
- psionlx-cf.img (an older 252 MB build) is NOT included: its boot
partition carried the NAND script.
- The "step1-repartition" BooSt script with the wrong 7e8 value is
NOT included. Only the correct 540 value for 32 MB hardware is.
* If you have an older PsionLX card from anywhere, look at partition 1
for a file called nBkPro.img and DELETE IT before booting. BooSt runs
it automatically. nBkProOs.img is the kernel and is fine; nBkPro.img
is the NAND script and is not.
Folder 2-WINDOWS-CE-RESTORE has Psion's official restore set and
step-by-step instructions if your CE is already gone.
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QUICK START
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You need: a netBook Pro, a CompactFlash card of 1 GB or larger, and a
card reader.
1. Go to 1-IMAGES/
2. Read README-WRITE-TO-CF.txt
3. Write psionlx-cf-1gb.img to the card
4. Put the card in the netBook Pro and power on
That is the whole process. Nothing is installed to the machine.
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WHAT IS IN EACH FOLDER
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1-IMAGES/
The two finished, ready-to-write CF card images, with checksums and
full writing instructions. This is what most people want.
2-WINDOWS-CE-RESTORE/
Psion's official Windows CE restore set for the netBook Pro, the
BooSt scripts to drive it, and instructions. Use this if the internal
NAND has been erased and the machine no longer boots CE.
3-PSION-SOURCES/
The preservation material, and the reason this release matters more
than the images do. Psion's own OpenEmbedded build tree, their
complete patched Linux 2.6.9 kernel source, their application
patches, and the original rootfs and boot images. Several of these
files exist in only one or two places in the world.
4-BUILD-SYSTEM/
Everything needed to rebuild the images yourself, including the ARM
OABI cross-build environment, the modified GPE sources, the build
scripts and the exact filesystem trees the images are made from.
5-REFERENCE/
Photographs of the real PsionLX prototype (the reference this
reconstruction was measured against), Psion's netBook Pro companion
CD including the user manuals in five languages, the BooSt dongle
documentation, and jLime, an unrelated later Linux for the same
machine.
6-PARKED-ORIGINALS/
Files that were replaced during the build and kept rather than
deleted, so that any change can be reversed and any substitution
can be checked.
WHAT-IS-EVERYTHING.txt
A file-by-file explanation of the entire release. Read this if you
want to know what any particular thing is.
PROVENANCE.txt
Where every file came from, what is Psion's own work, what was
rebuilt from their source, and what is a reconstruction. This is the
authoritative record and it is deliberately blunt about what is not
genuine.
SHA256SUMS.txt
Checksums for everything in this release.
EVERY FOLDER HAS ITS OWN README.txt
Not just the six above -- every folder, all the way down, including
each BooSt script, each source tree and each parked original. If you
are ever unsure what you are looking at, there is a file in that
directory that says.
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WHAT YOU GET ON THE MACHINE
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X11 with the Matchbox window manager, wearing Psion's own theme. The
Psion watermark down the left edge. The TODAY / PROGRAMS / TASKS strip
down the right, with the red power button at its foot. A 48-pixel dock
along the bottom.
22 applications, named the way Psion named them rather than the way
Linux names them -- Word, Sheet, Email, Web, Calendar, Contacts, Data,
Jotter, Time, Bombs, Record, Play, Media Player, My Network, Remote
Desktop, PDF Viewer, Image Viewer, Files, Solitaire, Sketch Pad,
Terminal, Text Editor, Control Panel, Printers, Internet Dialler.
29 of them are Psion's own builds: the version Psion pinned, with
Psion's patches applied, compiled for ARM OABI. 82 Psion patches in
total.
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WHAT IS KNOWN NOT TO WORK, OR TO BE MISSING
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Being honest about this matters more than the release looking finished.
* Do NOT tap the card ejector applet in the dock. Psion's eject.sh ends
with "/etc/pcmcia/ide stop hda". On their NAND-booted machine hda was
the CF slot; on this CF-booted image hda IS the root disk, so it will
unmount the filesystem you are running from. It is installed verbatim
because it is Psion's file.
* Psion's real gpe-appmgr (the launcher and the right-hand strip) and
gpe-buttonbox (the dock) were only ever in Psion's private CVS at
cvs.psiondev.com, which is gone. What you see is rebuilt from upstream
GPE plus new code, matched to Psion's photographs. It is close, not
identical, and the icons Psion drew for it are lost.
* The desktop background is rebuilt from Psion's splash artwork, not
their original.
* Two GNOME themes Psion's image manifest lists (grand-canyon and
lighthouseblue) could not be found anywhere and are absent. They are
cosmetic alternates; Psion's own theme is complete and is what is used.
* The gkdial 1.8.1 and xtscal 0.6.2 tarballs Psion pinned did not
survive. gkdial 1.8.0 is built instead, with all three of Psion's
patches. Touchscreen calibration is not stored in NVRAM as Psion's
xtscal patch would have done.
* This is a 2004-era Linux with a 2004-era browser. Firefox 1.0 cannot
load most of today's web: it has no modern TLS. Treat the network
side as a period-correct curiosity, not a working browser.
* Printing is present and the daemon starts, but it is untested against a
real printer. CUPS 1.1.23 with the ipp, lpd, parallel, socket and usb
backends, Ghostscript for rendering, and Printers in Control Panel. It
was assembled from the same Debian sarge package the rest of the stack
came from, because the released images had no CUPS backends at all and
the daemon was never started. If you get it printing to something, the
HPC:Factor community would like to hear about it.
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THE LOST IMAGE, IF YOU WANT TO HELP
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The original is called:
soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2
It was built on Psion's own build server at 07:42 GMT on 4 January 2005.
It was posted to RapidShare in November 2007 and re-uploaded to
uploaded.to in January 2010. Both hosts died without either copy being
crawled. It has been searched for exhaustively -- every web archive that
can be queried, in around eighteen languages -- and it is not on the
public internet.
It does still exist in private hands and on surviving prototype
machines. If you have a netBook Pro running PsionLX, or a CF card or
hard disk image from one, that image is the single most wanted missing
piece of this machine's history. Please make a copy of it before the
media dies.
One kernel in 3-PSION-SOURCES/original-images/ was built on Psion's own
server five hours before that image was, in the same build run. It is
the only genuinely Psion-built binary in this release.
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LICENCE AND CREDITS
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Psion Teklogix's code and artwork remain theirs; the company's assets
passed to Motorola Solutions and then to Zebra Technologies. Nothing
here is offered as a licence to Psion's work. It is published for
preservation, in the same spirit as every other abandoned platform in
the RetroTechCollection, and on the basis that PsionLX was never sold,
has no commercial value to anyone today, and will otherwise be lost
entirely.
The underlying system is Linux, GPE, Matchbox, GTK+ and the usual free
software stack, under the GPL, LGPL and similar licences. The source for
everything is in 3-PSION-SOURCES/ and 4-BUILD-SYSTEM/, which is rather
the point of the release.
If you represent Zebra Technologies and want something here taken down,
that is a reasonable request and it will be honoured.
Thanks are owed to: Marc Nijdam, who published Psion's oe-netbook tree;
AcidSnoop, who uploaded the original images in 2007 and preserved the
install instructions; "fuchs", who rebuilt the netBook Pro kernel in
March 2005; the HPC:Factor community, whose forum threads contain most
of what is known about booting this machine; and the Internet Archive,
without which none of the source material would still exist.
