Hot damn, only 4 days after the release and people have already figured out to gain root access to the Pre!
Credit goes to dsevil from the PreCentral forums for discovering the now infamous Easter Egg left by the Palm developers.
Those sneaky, but hilarious, developers found a way to incorporate the "Konami code" into WebOS. To enable developer mode, type
"upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart"
into the Universal Search, then hit the icon for Developer Mode and enable it.
From what I gather, enabling Developer Mode opens up the built-in firewall and allows some commands to be input. To continue unlocking the phone, follow this guide on enabling root access:
http://predev.wikidot.com/rooting
If you get stuck trying to run the "talk.py" script, install cygwin with Python and run the script from there. The script basically starts the telnet daemon and opens port 23 in iptables. Now you can login as root with no password through wifi.
As for making changes to the various configuration files, you first need to mount the root file system with read/write access, instead of the deafult read-only. Once you have root access, run:
mount -n -o remount,rw /
Any changes you make can now be saved. BE CAREFUL! There is a very real possibility of bricking your phone. Believe, me, I did it within the first 5 minutes of tinkering.
I changed the wrong character and my phone was stuck at the Palm boot screen. To unbrick your phone, you're going to have to run the WebOS installer found here:
http://palm.cdnetworks.net/rom...
Happy tinkering! If you find something cool, please post it here to share with others. If you want to talk with some really smart guys, come to the #webos-internals channel on irc.freenode.net.
