HP QuickWeb hacked!

It's official; HP QuickWeb is hacked!

The hack is based on the ASUS ExpressGate hack which was developed last year and just like with the EG hack this may be used to add or modify any software inside of QW, for now only xterm/rxvt has been tested but more will probably follow.

An initial analysis reveals that at least parts of QW was compiled with GCC 4.2 on Ubuntu.
While the origin of the included apt tools is unclear, it's certain that QW is based on a flavor of Debian.

Further details may be found through the Phoronix forum link above.

 

Interesting, but does anyone really even use HP Quick Web? I found it to be a pain and a bother. I like to boot to Windows and decide myself when and where I go on the web, thanks.

KJ

 

Well, right now I agree on that it doesn't really do much, but when you imagine things like XBMC or Boxee on there it becomes a lot more interesting

Setting up a shared directory shouldn't really be too difficult since we already mount a part of the windows disk to load parts of the file system.

Edit:
Actually sharing the Firefox session with Windows looks like just changing a symlink.

 

I found QuickWeb to be annoying to use and it was slower to boot that up than straight booting into Windows 7. I just deleted mine and move on into the desktop.

 

My goal is to make it at least somewhat usable (i.e. XBMC), but having it boot off the HDD isn't really an advantage in speed and the complete lack of proper graphics drivers for either graphics card makes me feel the same way.

HP really really should get a small SSD with a dedicated partition for future models. And proper drivers. With 3D support.

Anyway, I'm gonna hack it a bit more, see if I can get the Intel drivers working...

 

Though an SSD boots into Windows or wakes from hibernate in under 30 secs. Wakes from sleep almost instantly.

Sort of makes these pre-boot environments unnecessary.

Now what would be cool as a pre-boot environment is for it to boot almost instatly into a full media setup(something like a Media Center front end). Play movies, music, photos and such with a graphics driver so you can plug into HDMI and connect to a TV/surround receiver.

 

Let it not be said that 2.0 does not have some outstanding ideas!


KJ

 

Actually I'm afraid he's right... the stock version of QW runs without accelerated graphics. All you see is done by the CPU.

Apparently the quality check of QW was done by a dyslectic monkey as there are errors and segfaults all over the place. No wonder it sucks.

Even touching 3D or graphics drivers result in heaps of warnings and errors (mostly about the lack of driver info - since there is none). Also, apt-cache segfaults instantly and pressing anything but 'i' or ':' in vi makes it segfault too. The kernel was compiled with some old version of Ubuntu while python was compiled with an even older version of Debian Etch (which support happened to be dropped about a week after the compile date).

In short; it's a mess and I can't wait to replace everything with something more sane (latest from splashtop.com maybe?).

 

Thinking of replacing QuickWeb with Chromium, should be interesting a hybrid DM1z with Win 7 and Chrome OS. Got 3 more weeks off, I think dedicating a few days to this task should be fun.

 

I don't know what quick web is, I saw the title and immediately assumed something bad happened. But it seems like something good happened instead? Anyone want to clarify?

 

QuickWeb is specialized program that's separate from Windows. It can do web browsing and multimedia while not being logged on to Windows itself, it's suppose to save battery. I like QW but the email part sucks and have to log on to Windows to retrieve it anyways. QW is simplistic and is useful but the interface is lacking.

 

Like Expressgate from Asus products, its basically a stripped down Linux OS that the device can alternatively boot into via a switch trigger.

 

Never used QuickWeb. Somehow, I am just not fond of the notion of surfing, for any reason, outside the parameters of my software-based firewall/AV solution, ad blocker and HOSTS file. Relying solely on my router for protection, is, IMO, like playing russian roulette.

On a sidenote: seeing how this thread about QuickWeb being hackable, came along, I've started to wonder. My old dv6700 used to have the QuickWeb main interface startup everytime I opened my homepage. I had thought it may be a virus/trojan of some sort, but I never found any malware and my AV never picked up on anything. It was really annoying for awhile until I finally became fed up with it and disabled QuickWeb from lauching by removing it from the startup progams list in the registry.

 

Since QuickWeb is Linux based its actually ultra secure, in fact you can even turn on a read only mode so that nothing is written to the notebooks (/device) so if someone needs to just browse something and has a one button restore/clear all saved data is you don't have write protect on.

If I can get Chromium working on there is would be pure awesomeness, since Chrome has an app store like say Android or iOS it is very flexible (Tweetdeck/Flixter/Angry Birds (FREE)/Amazon Window/eReaders).

 

Anyone had luck with replacing QuickWeb with Android or anything other?

 

I don't think this is possible yet - Android only runs on devices with an ARM processor.

 

Up to 1.6 Android it worked on Intel too, there was some Atom based netbooks with Windows/Android dualboot. However I think I saw 2.x upgrade for one of those. Can't remember exactly.

 

Okay, thank you!
Apparently there's this Android-x86 Project. Don't know if this could work. Also never tried yet.

Anyone managed to boot any other OS?

 

Hi there, I have a brand new HP Pavillion DM4-3170se
I decided to try out the quickweb because I have the button right beside the power button however it does not work...
I went to HP support tried what they said and nothing worked.
turns out I do not have it installed in my computer at all
I talked with Support through chat and they told me that my laptop was not shipped with Quickweb
Later tells me that my computer does not have this spec.
Tell me why I have a button solely for quickweb but it is not functional???
He sent me a link to download quickweb to see if it would work and it did not. The installation told me" this version of hp quickweb is not supported on this system"
I have the button.. there has to be a way to get around this and install something that will allow quickweb to be supported on my laptop
Can anyone help me out?

 

Is it possible to replace QW with Ubuntu so that when I press the QuickWeb button it boots Ubuntu, the fact is that QuickWeb is useless but Ubuntu could be interesting. Did the Chromium Idea ever make any progress?

 

I was able to see ALL of the internal files. I dont remember how i found this out , but if you go into the browser and type view-source:file:/// it will show you the root of the file system. You cant interact, but every file is visible and altering the url will show you the files or the source of the files or even let you download them to a less restricted location.

I hope this helps.