PsionLX

PsionLX
The PROGRAMS screen of PsionLX on a netBook Pro development machine (photograph: Pulster)
Developer(s)	Psion Teklogix
Initial release	Unreleased
Type	Linux distribution (OpenEmbedded build of the GPE Palmtop Environment)
Platform	Psion netBook Pro (Intel XScale PXA255, 400 MHz)
Status	Beta. Builds of November 2004 and January 2005 survive

PsionLX is a Linux operating system that Psion Teklogix built for the Psion netBook Pro in 2004 and never released. Psion's own files call it Netbook LX and Psion LX, and its boot screen reads "PSION LX" with "BETA" underneath. It is an OpenEmbedded build of the GPE Palmtop Environment with a Psion theme, a Psion launcher, a Psion button bar and a set of office, internet and organiser applications patched by Psion for the machine. It runs on the same Intel XScale hardware that Psion Teklogix sold with Windows CE .NET 4.2.

Psion Teklogix never sold PsionLX as a product. It survives on a small number of development machines with 256 MB of RAM and 64 MB of flash, and as Psion's finished root filesystem image of 4 January 2005, which was shared on the HPC:Factor forum from November 2007. The forum's download links died, and for eleven years no public copy was known. On 2 October 2026 RetroTechCollection obtained the image, with the help of fss_88 and of Christoph Pulster himself, and it was published in Pulster's download archive in a copy dated 30 May 2007. Psion's own OpenEmbedded build tree also survives, and was recovered from the Internet Archive in September 2026. Between them, the image and the tree record the system almost completely.

This page covers the original system and its history, every surviving file and where each one came from, and the RetroTechCollection release of 2026, which boots PsionLX from a CompactFlash card on a standard netBook Pro. Its first edition, of 30 September 2026, was a reconstruction built from the build tree before Psion's image was found. The edition of 4 October 2026 is built on Psion's image itself, and offers it in the three forms described under The three images. RetroTechCollection has also finished Psion's "Find new software" task, which installs programs from PsionLX Software, a library in the same archive.

Names

Names used for the system

Name	Where it appears
Netbook LX	Psion's package manifest (meta-psion.oe: "Meta-packages for Psion Netbook LX"), the help index title "Using your Netbook LX", the initial ramdisk ("Netbook LX initial ramdisk boot script") and the BooSt script name "netBook LX BooSt script"
Psion LX	The boot splash and the Firefox start-page logo; the sync server recipe ("Synchonization Service for the Psion LX", Psion's spelling); a comment in the initial ramdisk ("Psion LX *inird* cardmanager config")
PsionLX	The auditeon.com wiki section "PsionLX Project for the Netbook Pro", and most forum posts from 2007 onwards
soho-image	The OpenEmbedded image recipe that builds the root filesystem. It sets IMAGE_BASENAME = "soho-image", which is where the file name soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2 comes from
LX, NBpro LX	Forum shorthand for the system, and also for the 256 MB development machines that carried it

Background

Psion Teklogix announced the netBook Pro in October 2003 as the successor to the Psion netBook. It kept the clamshell shape but moved from EPOC on a StrongARM to Windows CE .NET 4.2 on a 400 MHz Intel PXA255, with 128 MB of RAM and an 800 × 600 TFT display. The Register reported that Psion "looked at a variety OS options, including Linux, before settling on CE", quoting product manager Harvey Roberts.

In February 2004 Psion issued a statement reporting "positive results from a viability study of Netbook with Linux for professional users with specialist applications". Psion founder David Potter told the same reporter: "We see Linux as being very interesting, not only in terms of technology, but also in market dynamics."

On 4 April 2004 the netBook Pro was registered in the ARM Linux machine database as machine type 503, MACH_TYPE_NETBOOKPRO, "Psion Netbook Pro, PXA 255 based sub-notebook", with Peter Naulls as contact. It was never merged into the mainline kernel.

Wikipedia's article on Psion Teklogix states that the only outcome of Psion's Linux interest was "Linux as the operating system on a limited number of custom NetBook Pros designed for a hospital setting", citing a report in The Business of 23 May 2004 headed "NHS deal with Psion heralds move away from Windows". That report could not be checked for this page.

Development

Build system

PsionLX was built with OpenEmbedded. The tree's README describes the procedure: install Python, Psyco, ccache and GCC, check out oe-netbook from cvs.psiondev.com, point setup.sh at the central snapshots under /var/home/autobuild/oe/, then run oemake soho-image.

The image recipe pulls in four package groups and then adds the default user:

export IMAGE_BASENAME = "soho-image"
DEPENDS = "task-bootstrap meta-gpe meta-psion ttf-bitstream-vera"

add_netbook_tweaks() {
	# add lx user, group and homedir, and add it to sys group for printer admin
	echo "lx::1000:1000:LX Default User:/home/lx:/bin/sh" >>${IMAGE_ROOTFS}/etc/passwd
	...
	# point /lib/modules to the initrd, and have i2c and i2ckbd loaded
	ln -s ../initrd/lib/modules ${IMAGE_ROOTFS}/lib/modules
}

The desktop runs as user lx with an empty password, which is why PsionLX starts straight into the desktop with no login.

The tree holds 263 recipes in 144 directories. Five recipes fetch their source from Psion's own CVS server through the ${PDCVS} variable (cvs://${PDUSER}@cvs.psiondev.com/var/lib/cvs): the launcher gpe-appmgr, the button bar gpe-buttonbox, the help viewer gpe-helpviewer, the infoprint utility and the 2.4.26 kernel headers. Another twenty-two fetch from other CVS servers, mostly handhelds.org and freedesktop.org. The rest carry their payload in the tree or fetch a released tarball.

People named in the files

The files name several people. None of this establishes who employed whom, and the list below records only what the files say.

• The tree's CVS metadata names the account [email protected], and every file in the archive that carried the tree is owned by a user called peter.
• setup.sh carries the line "customised for netbook project by Robert McQueen <[email protected]>".
• The AbiWord recipes name Alex Loveday at a psion.com address as maintainer. The rdesktop, grdesktop, LinNeighborhood, Gaby and VNC recipes name Peter Naulls. Many GPE recipes keep the maintainer names of the upstream OpenEmbedded recipes they were copied from, such as Phil Blundell and Florian Boor.
• The NAND installer script NBLXLoad-cook.sh carries the CVS identifier $Id: NBLXLoad-cook.sh,v 1.8 2004/09/24 10:16:42 wookey Exp $.
• The netBook-specific drivers in Psion's own kernel image announce themselves as "(c) 2004 Simtec Electronics": the battery monitor, keyboard driver, power manager, SPI driver, NAND driver, Epson S1D13XXX framebuffer driver and Ricoh RTC driver. The later machine support file arch/arm/mach-pxa/netbookpro.c names Ben Dooks of Simtec Electronics as author.
• The kernel image that matches the lost root filesystem was built by autobuild@nexus.

In July 2006 a forum member wrote that "Psion contracted out development of a Linux distro, but decided not to release it", without giving a source.

The developers' wiki

Psion's developers kept a wiki. In December 2007 and April 2008 two forum members who held the developer archive, Acid Snoop and w_m0zart, wrote that they were preparing a public version of it with personal details removed, and that it had to be approved before release.

The site auditeon.com later carried a section titled "PsionLX Project for the Netbook Pro", last modified on 14 May 2008. Its index lists Action Status (ToDo List), Beta Changelog, Beta Release Notes, Beta Testing, Daily Build Status, Loading from CompactFlash, Project Communication Details, Recent Changes ("recent changes made by the PsionLX developers"), Xios Projects ("website doesn't exist anymore"), Cross Building, ScratchBox ("Cross compiling environment") and Using the PsionLX SDK ("if someone got it, let me know"). The site has since gone offline. Only the index page could be read for this article.

The tree itself includes an SDK recipe, meta-sdk.oe, which packages a cross toolchain (binutils, GCC and GDB) and the target C library for armv5te.

Build dates

The surviving files give a timeline. The dates come from version strings inside the kernel images, archive metadata and forum posts that quote the machines' own version screens.

PsionLX build dates recoverable from surviving files

Date	Evidence	Source
24 September 2004	Revision 1.8 of the NAND installer script NBLXLoad-cook.sh	Script header, posted on HPC:Factor
15 November 2004	Kernel "Build 15 nov 02:10:25 GMT 2004" and system stamp "2004-11-15 02:13" on a 256 MB development board with PsionLX in its internal flash	Owner's report
17 November 2004	Date of most files in the oe-netbook CVS checkout (the earliest is 28 October 2004)	CVS Entries files
19-23 November 2004	Cross-built gnome-games 2.6.2 and LinNeighborhood 0.6.5 .ipk packages	Archive file dates
30 December 2004	Checkout of the 2.6.9 kernel source	Archive file dates
4 January 2005, 02:27 GMT	Psion's kernel image: Linux version 2.6.9-rc1-bk18-nb1 (autobuild@nexus) (gcc version 3.4.0) #1 Tue Jan 4 02:27:32 GMT 2005	Version string in nBkProOs.img
4 January 2005, 02:31	Root filesystem soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2. Its /etc/version reads 200501040231, four minutes after the kernel above, and its file name records that the archive was assembled at 07:42:12 the same morning. A CF card carrying it reports "2005-01-04 02:31"	The image itself; owner's report
26 April 2006	netbook-linux-sources.tgz packed	gzip header

The owner of the development board first described its two builds as "build 2.13 dated nov 2004" and "2.31 2005". A later post from the same owner shows those figures are the times in the two date stamps, 02:13 and 02:31, rather than version numbers.

The development machines

PsionLX was developed on netBook Pros with a larger main board than the retail machine. Several owners describe it independently:

• "The Linux based Netbook Pros seem to have 64 MB of flash versus the normal NB Pro's 32" (July 2006).
• "Psion Lx motherboard ie 256mb ram and 64mb flash running Psion Lx beta" (October 2010), and "My netBook pro came with it installed. It has the 256mb/64mb motherboard which was used for Psion Lx development."
• "it is written for the special Netbook Pro version with 256mb RAM but its also working on normal ones" (January 2010).
• Pulster's sales listing: "Psion Netbook PRO with rare 256 MB RAM mainboard. Running Linux."

The standard machine has 128 MB of RAM and 32 MB of flash.

The LX BooSt script partitions the internal NAND differently from Windows CE. netbook-booting.txt, recovered with the LX installer, gives the commands for the LX prototype and warns that a standard machine needs a different value:

nand -ignore erase 18 ee8
nand partition e8

For a normal NBP the correct value should be 7e8 instead of e8.

A forum member who used the e8 script on a standard machine in 2009 found that Windows CE would no longer install into the smaller partition until the script was remade with 7e8. A 2007 guide to the BooSt supervisor mode gives the full-erase commands as nand -ignore erase 18 7e8 for a 32 MB machine and nand -ignore erase 18 fe8 for a 64 MB one, and warns that erasing below block 18 erases BooSt itself and leaves the machine unbootable.

RetroTechCollection's own restore of Windows CE in September 2026 did not bear out 7e8 as a partition value. On its standard machine a nand dump reads 0x800 blocks of 0x4000 bytes, 32 MB. There, nand partition 7e8 gave the whole chip to the operating-system partition and left Windows CE with no Flash Disk, so it reached its splash screen and stopped. nand partition 540 worked, leaving 10.6 MB of Flash Disk.

LX machines appeared for sale from time to time. Expansys asked "over a thousand dollars" for one earlier in 2008, a prototype appeared on eBay in June 2008 without source, and in February 2010 a forum member offered his 256 MB machine, bought from Pulster two years earlier, for €400, with the LX system "swapped for GPE". In September 2026 Pulster listed a "Psion Netbook PRO Linux - PsionLX" at €1,900.

Why it was not released

No official reason has been found. What exists is second-hand:

• In October 2007 a forum member who had asked Psion Teklogix support about the machine reported that they "claim they have no info on any 'in-house' linux version ever being pursued". Their final reply to his questions was "We are not aware of any undocumented features, and unfortunately we are unable to support your other requests."
• In November 2007 w_m0zart, who had an LX machine on loan from Pulster and held the developer sources, wrote: "From one of the developers I heard that the only reason why the LX project was not continued, was just a lack of performance of the NBP hardware."
• In February 2019 Acid Snoop reported that Zebra Technologies' EMEA support team had rejected his request for permission to publish the sources, telling him "the NBP ist end of life". Motorola Solutions bought Psion in 2012, and Zebra bought Motorola's enterprise business, including the former Psion assets, in October 2014.

How PsionLX reached the public

Circulation of PsionLX, 2006-2026

Date	Event
July 2006	A forum member reports seeing "a few Netbook Pros sold on eBay with this distro preloaded"
30 May 2007	The date on the copies of the root filesystem and the developer archive that later appeared in Christoph Pulster's download archive, five months before the image was first posted publicly
October 2007	The HPC:Factor thread "Netbook Pro I've found a working linux distro!" starts from community GPE images at linuxtogo.org. Members find the LX prototype partitioning values in netbook-booting.txt. Screenshots of Linux running on a netBook Pro prompt one member to suggest that someone "is in possession of one of the limited number of actual Linux netBook Pros"; they turn out to show Koen Kooi's OpenZaurus build, not Psion's
30 October 2007	w_m0zart, who signs his posts "Marc", writes that he has "a netbook pro LX (on loan from www.pulster.de)" and "the original LX linux (sources)". He found it "based around GPE", slow ("Starting firefox took much more than 30 seconds") and unable to see some files on CF cards
6 November 2007	Acid Snoop boots the image on his own netBook Pro from a 1 GB CF card, thanking "Marc for distributing me with the PsionLX image". His first complaint is that settings do not survive a restart
7 November 2007	Acid Snoop posts RapidShare links to nBkProOs.img and soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2: "Marc gave me the OK to upload the PsionLX files". The same evening he posts the links with German instructions on the Linux on tour forum. He is answering an offer made that morning by the dealer Christoph Pulster: goods worth €100 from his shop for whoever writes a guide to installing Linux that still allows a return to Windows CE. His instructions put nBkProOs.img on a 10 MB FAT16 partition and the extracted image on an ext2 partition of at least 140 MB, on a CF card (he used 1 GB), and leave the internal flash untouched
10 November 2007	Acid Snoop uploads netbook-linux-sources.tgz, plus a password-protected folder of "the original PsionLX sources the Teklogix developer used to build the PsionLX Linux OS", adding that "some of these files are still confidential"
December 2007 - May 2008	Acid Snoop and w_m0zart work on releasing a cleaned version of the developers' wiki. The auditeon.com PsionLX index is last modified on 14 May 2008
May-July 2009	bobbyshane posts a CF install guide that relinks the RapidShare image, and the Psion Linux blog repeats it, calling it "The official Psion Beta version which was never released (but is apparently more stable)"
20 January 2010	scops uploads a package containing the soho-image, nBkProOs.img, netbook-linux-sources.tgz, the kernel patch, netbook-booting.txt and mk-nBkProOsImg.c: "this is the hole package for Linux (Psion LX! not GPE!)"
31 March 2015	RapidShare shuts down
June 2017	psifi reports running LX from a CF card on his netBook Pro
February 2019	Acid Snoop still has "the binary of the working boost Image and a userspace archive of the last available build" and offers to upload them. HPC:Factor offers hosting
July-August 2026	fss-hacks asks on three HPC:Factor threads for anyone with PsionLX files, and photographs of a running PsionLX beta are published by fss_88
September 2026	RetroTechCollection recovers Psion's build tree from the Internet Archive, and on 30 September publishes a reconstruction built from it
2 October 2026	RetroTechCollection obtains the root filesystem with the help of fss_88 and Christoph Pulster. It is published in Pulster's download archive, in a folder titled "Psion LX - Linux prototype", beside a copy of the developer archive that is byte-identical to the one recovered from auditeon.com. It is the first public copy since the file-host links died
4 October 2026	RetroTechCollection publishes a new edition of its release, built on Psion's image

What users reported

The forum record is the only account of how PsionLX behaved in use.

• Booting from CF took about two minutes. Acid Snoop's account: a black screen, a red cursor, the PsionLX logo, then "a minute or something" before the pointer and the interface appeared. His German instructions give the stages: 20 to 30 seconds to "Please wait, booting..." under the red cursor, about 30 seconds more to the PsionLX logo, then about a minute while the interface loads, ending with GPE's cross-shaped pointer in the middle of a black screen.
• Firefox was slow to start: "much more than 30 seconds" by one account in 2007 and about 15 seconds by Acid Snoop's, and "a minute or so" in 2009, though once open it "loads pages way faster and better than ie in wince".
• The touchscreen came pre-calibrated, and the battery monitor sat on the taskbar.
• Wi-Fi worked on PsionLX in 2009 where the community GPE image of the time would not load pages. In 2007 Acid Snoop's Orinoco Gold card was recognised straight away and connected to his access point.
• The card had to stay in the slot. The root filesystem was just under 150 MB, too large for the 32 MB internal flash, of which about 29 MB is left after BooSt, because it included large programs such as Mozilla.
• One user got "permission denied" messages during boot. After making the whole filesystem writable with chmod -R 777 he had to restore the setuid bit on /bin/tinylogin before su, mount and umount worked again. He could not set the date and time, and found the built-in help "sehr mager" (very thin).
• Suspend worked the same way as under Windows CE, by closing the lid or pressing Fn+Off.
• The e-mail application could corrupt the system: "On both version the email app will corrupt the O/S and make it unuseable."
• The community GPE image was described as faster: "even better (faster) than Psion LX. Psion LX has more apps", and "less of a load than the lx stuff that psion produced".
• "psion-lx one is a customised GPE as well."

What PsionLX contained

Everything in this section is taken from Psion's own root filesystem, build tree and kernel image, except where another source is cited. It describes Psion's system as Psion built it, not RetroTechCollection's images.

The root filesystem

Psion's finished system is soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2, 36,911,573 bytes. It holds 6,221 entries: 4,815 files, 506 symbolic links, 841 directories and 59 device nodes. Its base is Familiar Linux 0.8.0-pre1, and its package database lists 315 installed packages, among them every package in Psion's manifest meta-psion.oe.

Several things show that it is Psion's own build:

• Its launcher, gpe-appmgr-psion 56-r0, records its source as cvs://[email protected]/var/lib/cvs;module=gpe/gpe-appmgr;tag=GPE_APPMGR_56: Psion's private CVS server, and the tag Psion's build tree names. Its button bar, gpe-buttonbox-psion 51-r0, comes from the same server with the tag GPE_BUTTONBOX_51.
• /etc/version reads 200501040231, 02:31 on 4 January 2005, four minutes after autobuild@nexus built Psion's kernel image. The image does not record its own build host.
• /home/lx belongs to uid and gid 1000, as Psion's image recipe sets it.
• It is intact and self-consistent: the bzip2 stream verifies end to end, and every one of its 315 programs links against the image's own libraries with no unresolved symbols.

The image holds Psion's built copies of four programs whose source lived only on Psion's CVS server and is still lost: the launcher, the button bar, the help viewer gpe-helpviewer and infoprint. For four packages it carries newer versions than any recipe in the November 2004 build tree: AbiWord 2.0.14, which checks spelling through enchant, Gaim 1.0.3, gnome-cups-manager 0.27, and GStreamer 0.8.7 with plugins 0.8.5. Psion went on changing its recipes after that checkout.

Boot sequence

Psion's 800 × 600 PsionLX boot splash, from the gpe-bootsplash recipe in Psion's tree

The same splash on a running netBook Pro (photograph: fss_88)

The netBook Pro's firmware bootloader, BooSt, loads an operating system image named nBkProOs.img from internal NAND or from a CompactFlash card. BooSt reports itself as "Psion Teklogix netBook2 BooSt". For Linux the image is a kernel and initial ramdisk wrapped in a 256-byte BooSt header. netbook-booting.txt documents the header: platform ID 0x326B426E, load offset 0x408000, and image flags 0x10003 for a CF image (maximum 8,388,608 bytes) or 0x10013 for a NAND image (maximum 3,702,784 bytes). Bit 16 marks the payload as zlib-compressed and bit 4 copies it to the OS partition. A 2007 analysis found extra start-up code in Psion's boot images, which sets up the hardware and moves the kernel and ramdisk into place, and for which no source has been found.

The kernel is 2.6.9-rc1-bk18-nb1. The same forum analysis found the kernel source in Psion's archive identical to 2.6.9-rc1-bk18 with linux-2.6.9-pre1-bk18-nbp1.patch, published in Koen Kooi's directory at linuxtogo.org, applied. Psion's image also carries module paths for 2.4.26-vrs1-pxa1-nb1, and the tree has a 2.4.26 kernel recipe, so a 2.4 kernel was built for the machine as well.

The initial ramdisk script, "Netbook LX initial ramdisk boot script", handles both kernel series. Under 2.4 it loads the i2c and i2ckbd keyboard modules; under 2.6 it prints "Running Linux 2.6 System". It then:

1. mounts the first CF partition read-only and, if it holds an executable NBLXLoad.sh, runs it (this is how a new system was written to the internal flash);
2. tries to mount the internal NAND as JFFS2 (/dev/mtdblock/0) as the root filesystem;
3. if that fails, tries the second CF partition (/dev/hda2);
4. pivots into the root filesystem, leaving the ramdisk at /initrd, and starts /sbin/init.

The community CF boot image of March 2005 changed this script in one way: it tries the card before the internal flash. Its ramdisk keeps Psion's original beside the new script, byte for byte, as linuxrc~.

The ramdisk stays mounted at /initrd because it holds the kernel modules. The image recipe points /lib/modules at ../initrd/lib/modules for that reason.

The root filesystem was built to live in the internal flash. Its /etc/fstab has no line for the root filesystem, and mounts NAND partition 1, /dev/mtdblock1, as a JFFS2 /home. Psion's image recipe calls the /home/lx inside the image the "emergency" home directory, "normally overwritten by /home mount". On the first boot 22 packages are still waiting to be configured, and a start-up script runs ipkg-cl configure on them and then deletes itself, which takes a few minutes.

On the root filesystem, gpe-bootsplash draws Psion's splash, and gpe-dm starts Xepson, the kdrive X server for the netBook Pro's Epson display controller, and runs the scripts in /etc/X11/Xinit.d. The last of them, Psion's 99psion-session, hands the display to user lx:

chown lx /dev/dsp /dev/mixer
if ! grep -q '^lx::' /etc/passwd; then
  exec gpe-login
else
  ln -s /var/tmp/xsession-errors.lx /home/lx/.xsession-errors
  exec su lx -c /etc/X11/Xsession >> /home/lx/.xsession-errors 2>&1
fi

The session then runs Psion's 95psion-apps, which copies Psion's button bar layout into the user's home directory ("this also neatly avoids the annoying welcome screen and timezone setter", in the script's own comment), and starts Matchbox with Psion's session file:

gpe-soundserver &
gpe-appmgr -d -r &
matchbox-panel --orientation south --size 48 --no-menu &
exec matchbox-window-manager $@

The desktop

The TODAY screen of PsionLX on a netBook Pro (photograph: fss_88). The date is the machine's clock.

Psion's PROGRAMS screen, drawn by Psion's launcher from Psion's files: the root filesystem running under emulation in October 2026

The desktop is gpe-appmgr in desktop mode (-d) and row view (-r), built from Psion's own branch of the program (CVS tag GPE_APPMGR_56). Its artwork is in the image, and matches the photographs of running machines:

• A gold strip down the right-hand edge with three tabs, TODAY, PROGRAMS and TASKS. It is drawn from three images of 26 × 552 pixels, one for each selected tab. At its foot is an orange power button, 20 × 20 pixels, which suspends the machine by running apm -s.
• TODAY shows the date and a summary: whether a Wi-Fi card is present, whether there is an internet connection, unread and outgoing e-mail, today's appointments and the to-do list. The desktop always starts on TODAY. Its "Show this screen at startup" checkbox makes the desktop return to TODAY each time it is shown.
• PROGRAMS shows the applications in four boxed groups, OFFICE, INTERNET, PIM and OTHER, each labelled down its left side with a rotated name drawn from an image. A fifth, hidden group, Settings, is the Control Panel, whose menu entry runs gpe-appmgr -g Settings.
• A pale embossed Psion blockletter watermark, desktop-background.png, runs down the left of the screen.
• A 48-pixel bar along the bottom holds Psion's button bar (gpe-buttonbox, Psion's CVS tag 51) on the left, and the clock, volume, battery and card-ejector applets on the right. The button bar's layout is built into the program: Desk and Docs, then up to six presets read from /etc/gpe/button-box.apps (Email, Web, Word, Sheet, Calendar and Contacts), then Other, which names the window in front. "Buttonbar Setup" in the Control Panel edits a user's own copy of the list.

The bar itself is Psion's build of matchbox-panel 0.8.1. Psion's panel layout file lists its contents, with a tab character separating the left group from the right:

gpe-buttonbox -p
	
gpe-clock
mb-applet-battery
minimix
psion-card-ejector

Psion's TASKS screen: eleven tasks in five rows, under emulation in October 2026

The TASKS screen lists eleven tasks in five rows. The launcher builds it from a table of labels, icons and commands inside the program:

Psion's TASKS screen

Row	Task	What it runs
FILES	Back up your information	backup.sh, which in Psion's image copies nothing (see Bugs in Psion's own image)
	Synchronise with a PC	lx_sync.sh, which is not in the image
	Set 'My Documents' Location	mydocs.sh, which points ~/My Documents at the RAM disk, a CF or MMC card, or a PC Card
CONNECT	Connect to the Internet	iconnect.sh, a short wizard that opens the dialler for a modem, or the network settings for a wired or wireless connection
	Find new software	Nothing. The entry has no command, and the launcher shows "This task is not yet implemented". RetroTechCollection wrote the program in 2026: see PsionLX Software
	Update system software	gpe-package -u, against Psion's package feeds
SECURITY	Set password	gpe-conf users password
HELP	Get help	The help viewer, opening "Using your Netbook LX"
	Two-minute tutorial	The help viewer, opening the sixteen-page tutorial
VISUALS	Choose theme	gpe-conf theme
	Change wallpaper	gpe-conf task_background

Three recipes in the build tree describe themselves as task scripts: iconnect ("Internet connection script for tasks screen"), backup ("Backup script for tasks screen") and mydocs ("Task to specify location of My Documents"). The tree also holds an earlier form of the page. Psion's add-backup.patch of 26 August 2004 edits an HTML file, gpe-appmgr/tasks.html, turning "Back up your information" into a link to launch:backup.sh beside an entry reading "Get help".

Theme, settings and keyboard

The psion-theme package has two halves. The GTK half is a gtkrc using the "mist" engine, with a #E2E2E2 base and #a1b6d7 for the clock and button bar. The window manager half is 20 PNG images plus theme.xml and theme.desktop. Psion derived it from the Blondie Matchbox theme and never renamed it: theme.xml still opens <theme name="blondie" author="Matthew Allum - [email protected]", with bgcol and dockcol set to #a1b6d7.

Psion's XSettings defaults set the interface font to Sans 8. Psion's override, four lines, sets the double-click timing, turns Matchbox compositing off and selects the theme. That one setting selects both halves of the theme, so the window manager is started without a theme argument:

Net/DoubleClickTime:I:600
Net/DoubleClickDistance:I:7
MATCHBOX/COMPOSITE:S:off
Net/ThemeName:S:psion

The session also sets LANG=en_GB, sets GPE_PRETEND_STYLUS=1, and loads Psion's keyboard map for the machine, xmodmap-netbookpro. In the shipped image the map gives F1 the keycode 0x92; the copy in the November 2004 build tree has 0x08. Psion's Matchbox keyboard bindings are:

Psion's window manager key bindings (kbdconfig)

Keys	Action
Mod3 + D	Show the desktop
Mod3 + C	Touchscreen calibration (xtscal)
Mod3 + Left Alt	Internet dialler (gkdial)
Ctrl + Alt + Backspace	reset.sh, which asks "Are you sure you wish to restart the session?"
Alt + Tab, Alt + Shift + Tab	Next and previous window
Alt + Escape	Show the desktop
Alt + 4	Close the window

Help is a set of 102 HTML pages titled "Using your Netbook LX", packaged as nineteen help packages that cover first steps, the internet and each of the main applications, and there is a sixteen-page tutorial.

Applications

meta-psion.oe ("Meta-packages for Psion Netbook LX", revision r23) groups the applications into psion-apps, psion-net, psion-media, psion-games and psion-debug. Psion's PROGRAMS screen shows 22 of them: the 21 in the photograph of a development machine, plus Database, which the photograph does not show. The names are Psion's, from override files in /usr/share/gpe/overrides. The table gives the version installed in Psion's image beside the newest version in Psion's recipes, and the recipes' patch counts.

The 22 applications on Psion's PROGRAMS screen

Launcher name	Group	Package	Version in the image	Newest recipe	Psion's patches
Calculator	OFFICE	galculator	1.2.3	1.2.3	7
Database	OFFICE	Gaby	2.0.3pre	2.0.3pre	3
Sheet	OFFICE	Gnumeric	1.3.93	1.3.93	9 (psion.patch alone changes 24 files)
Sketch Pad	OFFICE	gpe-sketchbook	0.2.8	0.2.8	3
Word	OFFICE	AbiWord	2.0.14	2.0.12	4, including abiword-psion.patch, which sets Thorndale AMT as the default font
Email	INTERNET	Balsa	2.2.2	2.2.2	2 (netbook-20041110.patch changes 86 files)
Instant Messenger	INTERNET	Gaim	1.0.3	1.0.0	1
Internet Dialler	INTERNET	gkdial	1.8.1	1.8.1	3
Remote Desktop	INTERNET	grdesktop with rdesktop	0.23 and 1.3.1	0.23 and 1.3.1	desktop-name.patch on grdesktop; 4 on rdesktop
Web	INTERNET	Firefox	1.0	1.0	8, including startup-page.patch, which opens Psion's branded start page
Calendar	PIM	gpe-calendar	0.58	0.58	5
Contacts	PIM	gpe-contacts	0.32	0.32	7
Files	PIM	gpe-filemanager	0.21	0.21	6
Image Viewer	PIM	gpe-gallery	0.95	0.95	5
To-do list	PIM	gpe-todo	0.49	0.49	4
Control Panel	OTHER	gpe-conf	0.1.21	0.1.21	8
Media Player	OTHER	Totem	0.99.15.1	0.99.15.1	4
My Network	OTHER	LinNeighborhood	0.6.5	0.6.5	4
PDF Viewer	OTHER	gpdf	2.7.90	2.7.90	2
Solitaire	OTHER	AisleRiot, from gnome-games	2.6.2	2.6.2	short-name.patch
Terminal	OTHER	gpe-terminal	1.1	1.1	none
Text Editor	OTHER	gpe-edit	0.28	0.28	3

Psion's override files also name the clock "Alarm clock" and add "My VCard", the owner's own contact card, to the Control Panel, which holds seventeen settings programs.

The same manifest adds the Agfa fonts, the aspell English dictionary, the GNOME CUPS print manager ("Printers", in the Control Panel) and ESP Ghostscript, Zenity, infoprint, Bluetooth and IrDA beaming, the aumix and minimix volume controls, and the debugging tools strace, mtd, xprop, xhost, scap, ldd, gdbserver and catchsegv. A comment beside the games group reads "want minesweeper :P".

Underneath, Psion built its own copies of the base libraries: GTK+ 2.4.13 with 18 patches, GLib 2.4.7, Pango 1.4.1, and Xepson, a kdrive X server from a CVS snapshot of 21 October 2004, with 5 patches.

Other Psion components

Psion-specific packages in the build tree

Package	What it does
psion-session	Session start-up scripts, button bar layout, XSettings override, keyboard map, locale, stylus setting and the session-reset script
psion-theme	The GTK and Matchbox theme described above
psion-help, psion-tutorial	The help pages, "Using your Netbook LX", packaged as nineteen help packages, and the sixteen-page tutorial
gpe-helpviewer, infoprint	Psion's HTML viewer for the help and tutorial, and a small utility, both fetched from Psion's CVS. Their source is lost; Psion's built copies are in the image
psion-card-ejector	A panel applet that runs eject.sh as root. The script unmounts any CF and MMC cards, stops the IDE card service on hda and hdc, and then shows "You can now remove your CF or MMC cards safely"
psion-sierra	PCMCIA card definitions for the "Sierra Wireless AC710/AC750 GPRS Network Adapter" and the "Pretec CompactModem or Globetrotter GPRS", both bound to the serial driver
ppp	GPRS peer files for Orange, Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile with their chat scripts
wpan-tools	bt_connect.sh and ir_connect.sh, dial-up helpers for Bluetooth and IrDA phones
plptools	Psion's build of the PLP tools with a plp_upgrade script which "Extracts and moves files from previous versions of Psion Product over to the LX": it starts ncpd on the serial port and runs plpbackup against an EPOC Psion
sync-serv	"LX Sync Server", a small C program that answers file, SQL, directory-listing and command requests from a Windows PC over a pipe
iconnect, backup, mydocs	The TASKS screen scripts
agfa-fonts	Albany AMT, Thorndale AMT, Cumberland AMT and Arial Narrow, sixteen faces in all. The tree's recipe (r5) installs them, but the package in the shipped image (1.0-r6) is installed and empty, so Psion's image has Bitstream Vera as its only font
gpe-appmgr-psion, gpe-buttonbox-psion	The launcher (tag 56) and button bar, fetched from Psion's CVS. The tree's recipe asks for button bar tag 50, and the image carries tag 51. The source of both is lost, but Psion's built programs and their artwork are in the image. The button bar package also installs Psion's override files, 21 menu entries and 28 icons in /usr/share/gpe/overrides
psion-kernel	Headers-only recipe for the 2.4.26 kernel, fetched from Psion's CVS

Surviving material

Recovered files

These are every file relating to PsionLX that has been found, with where each came from. Sizes are in bytes. Several were recovered from the Internet Archive after the sites that hosted them closed.

Files recovered for PsionLX

File	Size	What it is	Where it came from
soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2	36,911,573	Psion's finished root filesystem of 4 January 2005, 6,221 entries. See The root filesystem	Obtained by RetroTechCollection with the help of fss_88 and Christoph Pulster, and published in Pulster's download archive, folder "Psion LX - Linux prototype", on 2 October 2026 with a file date of 30 May 2007. The copies posted on RapidShare in November 2007 and on ul.to in January 2010 were never archived
netbook-linux-sources.tgz	106,074,940	Psion's developer archive, packed on 26 April 2006, 347,985,920 bytes and 31,531 entries unpacked. See the table below for its contents. It is the same file name that Acid Snoop uploaded in November 2007 and scops in January 2010	www.auditeon.com/xyz/psion/, via the Internet Archive. Nothing indexes it. It was found by following every URL posted in five HPC:Factor threads, which led to the linuxtogo wiki page NetbookPro/Installing2Nand, which cites auditeon.com in passing. Pulster's download archive holds a byte-identical copy named psion-netbookpro-linux-sources.tgz
nBkProOs.img (inside the archive)	3,613,045	Psion's own CF boot image, kernel built by autobuild@nexus on 4 January 2005, the same day as the lost root filesystem. BooSt flags 0x10003 (CF)	netbook-linux-sources.tgz
nBkProOs.img_cf	3,659,808	A CF boot image built outside Psion from the same kernel version: Linux version 2.6.9-rc1-bk18-nb1 (fuchs@gibson) (gcc-Version 3.3.4) #1 Fri Mar 25 18:13:14 CET 2005. BooSt lists it as "NETBOOKPRO Linux26". Forum members used it to boot the PsionLX root filesystem from CF	linuxtogo.org/~florian/ (offline), via the Internet Archive
gpe-fs-cf.tar.bz2	14,227,676	A community GPE root filesystem for CF, 2,383 entries. /etc/version reads 200503081928 and /etc/issue "Familiar Linux Unofficial Snapshot". Not PsionLX	linuxtogo.org/~florian/. The archive holds it only under its index.php?download= address, not its direct path
gpe-image-3.5.4.1-netbook-pro.rootfs.jffs2	15,450,112	An OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 GPE image for the internal flash, 1,939 files. /etc/version reads 200608040117, so it is a later build than the CF root filesystem, not a copy of it. Not PsionLX	linuxtogo.org/~florian/, via the Internet Archive
nBkPro.img	300	A BooSt script named "netBook LX BooSt script" holding the LX prototype NAND commands	linuxtogo.org/~anonymous/ (offline), via the Internet Archive
netbook-booting.txt	3,958	A description of the LX boot and install process and the BooSt header format	linuxtogo.org/~anonymous/
mk-nBkProOsImg.c	5,496	Source of the tool that wraps a kernel and ramdisk into a BooSt image	linuxtogo.org/~anonymous/
nBkProOs.img	3,403,850	A NAND boot image of the same kernel version, built by fuchs@gibson on 8 March 2005. BooSt flags 0x10013 (NAND)	linuxtogo.org/~anonymous/
gpe-image.jffs2	22,822,912	A third GPE build, again for the internal flash: "Familiar Linux v0.8.3-unofficial-unsupported-snapshot-20051104", 2,223 files. It includes AbiWord 2.4 and Gaim. Neither of the two JFFS2 images carries gpe-appmgr or gpe-buttonbox	linuxtogo.org/~anonymous/
NBLXLoad.sh	633	The script the initial ramdisk runs to write a root filesystem to the internal flash. It takes the first .jff or .jffs2 file in /rootfs, erases the flash with flash_eraseall -j and writes the file with nandwrite --blockalign=2. The copy at linuxtogo.org was never archived: all nine Internet Archive captures are an HTTP 403 page, because the server refused to serve .sh files. Its text was also posted on HPC:Factor on 30 October 2007	A copy uploaded on 26 March 2010 to the anetbookpro download area at TuxFamily, still online
BooStDongle.pdf	217,046	"How to enter the BooSt superuser mode in the Netbook Pro", a one-page guide dated 12 July 2007 by w_m0zart	Kept with the auditeon.com files; its download location was not recorded
Three Psion PDFs	various	A different revision of the BooSt dongle sheet, an accessory compatibility list, and an 11-page "BooSt-Super-User-Mode-commands" document. The last is chapter 4 of the hardware development kit manual for the Workabout Pro, a Psion Teklogix machine with the same bootloader, and documents its doc command rather than the netBook Pro's nand	Pulster's download archive
OpenEmbedded netbook-pro machine files	small	The later community machine configuration, a 2.6.17 kernel recipe, fstab and touchscreen settings	The OpenEmbedded classic repository, still online
linux-2.6.9-pre1-bk18-nbp1.patch	954,777	netBook Pro support for the 2.6.9 kernel the device runs, patching 174 files, including the machine file netbookpro.c, the keyboard, NAND, PC Card and display drivers, and a netbookpro_defconfig dated 14 September 2004. The full patched tree in the developer archive supersedes it	linuxtogo.org/~koen/ (offline), via the Internet Archive
2.6.17 kernel patches	small	netbook-base-r0 to r3, netbook-pcon-r0, netbook-pcon-i2c-r0 and r1, netbook-pm-r0, a defconfig and the machine file netbookpro.c. The patches and defconfig the recipe uses match its MD5 checksums	linuxtogo.org/~koen/ (offline), via the Internet Archive
GPE release tarballs	various	Every GPE application release that Psion's recipes pin, plus gpe-appmgr 2.8, gpe-buttonbox 0.5 and minimix 0.6	The gpe.linuxtogo.org mirror of the GPE download tree, via the Internet Archive. The original gpe.handhelds.org was never archived
jlime-xfce-image-2012.3-netbookpro-20120311.rootfs.tar.bz2	88,409,659	jLime 2012.3 with the XFCE desktop, 28,423 files. The newest Linux release found for the machine. Not PsionLX	HPC:Factor's public repository, which mirrored jLime after jlime.com closed
nbpswfeb18english04218.zip	19,505,892	The Windows CE 4.2 restore image, for returning a machine to its shipped state	vigay.com
1000999D.ISO	30,750,720	Psion's netBook Pro companion CD. The volume is dated 10 November 2004. It holds the Windows side only: ActiveSync, USB setup, Pocket On-Schedule and its guides, and the user manual in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Not PsionLX	The Internet Archive item 1000999d_netbook_pro_cd, uploaded in December 2019

The developer archive contains:

Contents of netbook-linux-sources.tgz

Top-level entry	Entries	What it is
oe-netbook/	2,807	Psion's OpenEmbedded tree, with its CVS metadata
linux-2.6.9/	21,464	The kernel source used on the device, checked out on 30 December 2004
kdegames-3.3.1/	5,165	KDE games source
gnome-games-2.6.2/	1,639	GNOME games source with ARM objects compiled in November 2004. Solitaire (AisleRiot) comes from here
linneighborhood-0.6.5/	300	LinNeighborhood source ("My Network")
rdesktop-cvs/	152	rdesktop source
Three .ipk files	3	Psion's LinNeighborhood 0.6.5 packages, releases r7 and r8 and a German locale, built 23 November 2004
nBkProOs.img	1	Psion's CF boot image of 4 January 2005

SHA-256 checksums of the recovered binaries:

File	SHA-256
soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2	baa176ff06dcda9d58e86e17f76be3f19e63edbf791515cbea9111e22a0ae11d
netbook-linux-sources.tgz	a14b7d2e87217fdc2f5d32752a00ca0959ae5b1f312a6116d1a895d248edf08f
nBkProOs.img (Psion, from the archive)	88dcfa0ab10750b76ed251b919ee66db5395ac2be379ae81abd6ede7b4e4b890
nBkProOs.img_cf	bc640360e58d858b2d260450e20621adc93cb51e0fcccadaf2a97f415099bd1b
gpe-fs-cf.tar.bz2	532e322fdd9a1275e953818ff575a36a1c0249fea526d9c53315f07b390f1866
gpe-image-3.5.4.1-netbook-pro.rootfs.jffs2	8094d741422036c13801579aa69e477ed8bca61827e8edcc0a770dda29254738
nBkPro.img	0f56875793d46c36ce725157e99b82ef4f1a64f2c60b99cc16912d3a3b775476
nBkProOs.img (linuxtogo, NAND)	003ef6d5455e4397aaee80e8942bc11d1ab1178220515e1d6aa2f4cf8b15ff7d
gpe-image.jffs2	1db13b43cfe8055c5b8fea27bdb0a2c510e448f574dbcbad53dddfbd85881e35
jlime-xfce-image-2012.3-netbookpro-20120311.rootfs.tar.bz2	ce14633797a2d4562ecdfb07db19974b8417df43bc96bed9595e43ac3f9060fc
NBLXLoad.sh (TuxFamily)	583095e51004129de568dfd216d9cf207fec34c09cb9eade41d9e712556f2280
linux-2.6.9-pre1-bk18-nbp1.patch	5fe432d2445e927e65c7859afa34371e0e080626c5887f7815d698972011e0b6
1000999D.ISO	7d646c2841cfbdd1f636814bb0129339ba7cb7e88b7d2e74f8a5c87862d5c967

What has not been found

Missing PsionLX material

Item	What it was	Status
Psion's CVS server, cvs.psiondev.com	The source of the launcher (tag GPE_APPMGR_56), the button bar (tag GPE_BUTTONBOX_51 in the image, 50 in the tree), gpe-helpviewer, infoprint and the 2.4.26 kernel	Offline. The Internet Archive holds one URL from psiondev.com. Psion's built copies of the first four are in the root filesystem, but their source is lost
soho-image-netbook-pro-20040831070503.rootfs.jffs2	An earlier soho image, built on 31 August 2004 for the internal flash	Known by name only
gpe-image-netbook-pro-32-20050810.rootfs.jffs2 and its bootstrap image	An image of August 2005 for a 32 MB machine, 20.6 MB, and a 2.4 MB bootstrap image	Known from an archived directory listing, which gives their sizes
gkdial-1.8.1.tar.gz	The upstream release Psion's dialler recipe pins	Not in the Internet Archive, SourceForge or the Debian archives. 1.8.0 survives, and Psion's built 1.8.1 is in the root filesystem
xtscal-0.6.2.tar.bz2	The touchscreen calibrator Psion patched (xtscal-nbp.patch) to keep calibration in the netBook Pro's NVRAM	The upstream release is not archived under any mirror path used by the recipe or the GPE tree. Psion's patched build is in the root filesystem
The password-protected source folder	"the original PsionLX sources the Teklogix developer used", uploaded by Acid Snoop in November 2007, which he later said contained "Developer names, comments, Roadmaps"	Never published
The developers' wiki	Beta release notes, changelog, daily build status, SDK instructions	Only the auditeon.com index page has been read
The PsionLX SDK	The built toolchain from meta-sdk.oe	Not found. The auditeon index asks "if someone got it, let me know"
Psion's binary packages	The .ipk feed the image was assembled from	The root filesystem holds the installed contents and package records of 315 packages, but not the package files. Only the three LinNeighborhood packages in the developer archive survive as files

Before the root filesystem was found, the searches for it covered the Internet Archive (exact URLs, URL prefixes and domain sweeps of jlime.com, hpcfactor.com, repository.hpcfactor.com, linuxtogo.org, psiondev.com, handhelds.org, familiar.handhelds.org, openembedded.org and psionlinux.blogspot.com), a full enumeration of HPC:Factor's public repository, GitHub code and repository search including the tworaz netBook Pro repositories, archive.org item and full-text search, Software Heritage, the OpenPsion mailing list and the archived blog comment feeds. One trap is worth recording for anyone repeating the work: a Wayback Machine CDX query of the form url=*/filename* returns nothing for files that are archived, because a leading wildcard is not a supported match type. An empty result from that query form proves nothing.

A second search at the end of September 2026 added arquivo.pt's full-text index, Common Crawl, the Internet Archive's complete index of linuxontour.de (which linked to the files but never hosted them), the live directory at kernelconcepts.de/~florian/, the code archives and forges Software Heritage, GitLab, SourceForge, Codeberg, Gitea, git.kernel.org, repo.or.cz, the Google Code Archive, Gitorious, Savannah, BerliOS, Launchpad and Bitbucket, and searches in German, Russian and twelve other languages. Only the German search found anything: the 2007 Linux on tour post. Six sites could not be searched by script, because of blocks, captchas or logins, and have not been checked by hand: 4pda.to, Yandex, Baidu, forum.ixbt.com, mikrocontroller.net and a1k.org. Two more traps: the Wayback Machine's CDX interface fails over plain HTTP where the same query over HTTPS works, and when it is throttled it returns an empty result that looks like "no captures". Every query needs a control that is known to be archived, run in the same batch.

The root filesystem was not online while those searches ran. Pulster's download area began in July 2026, and the folder that holds the image is dated 2 October 2026 in its listing, two days after the second search stopped. Pulster was already on the project's list of leads, for the PsionLX machine he was selling. In the end RetroTechCollection obtained the image with the help of fss_88 and of Pulster himself, and it was published in his separate file archive rather than through his shop.

The RetroTechCollection release

This section documents RetroTechCollection's own work. Its figures come from the project's build files, the built images and measurements made for them, not from published sources, and are cited to the project's records.

RetroTechCollection has published PsionLX as bootable CompactFlash images for a standard 128 MB netBook Pro in two editions. The first, on 30 September 2026, was a reconstruction. With Psion's image lost, it rebuilt the system from Psion's build tree on a community root filesystem, and redrew the launcher, button bar and watermark from photographs. Two days later RetroTechCollection obtained Psion's image (see How PsionLX reached the public), and the edition of 4 October 2026 is built on it. Where the reconstruction guessed, Psion's own files now stand.

• 
  Psion's own PROGRAMS screen, from the safe image running under emulation on 4 October 2026
• 
  Psion's build on a development machine (photograph: Pulster). The same screen, without Database
• 
  The first edition's reconstruction, captured on 28 September 2026

The three images

All three images are built from Psion's root filesystem, and each is a complete 1 GB card: a FAT16 boot partition holding the kernel, and an ext2 root filesystem. Every file keeps the mode and owner that Psion's archive gives it.

The three card images, 4 October 2026

Image	Root filesystem	Kernel	Internal flash	PROGRAMS screen
psionlx-cf-1gb.img	Psion's, plus Find new software, applications Psion did not ship, Psion's Agfa fonts, fixes for bugs in Psion's image and the safety changes	Hardened (see below)	Never touched	37 programs
psionlx-cf-1gb-soho-safe.img	Psion's, with three safety changes only	Hardened	Never touched	Psion's 22
psionlx-cf-1gb-soho-original-ARCHIVAL.img	Psion's, unchanged, down to every file's mode, owner and device node	Psion's own, of 4 January 2005, unchanged	Read and mounted at boot. For preservation only	Psion's 22

The full image, psionlx-cf-1gb.img, is the one to use. Of the 6,161 entries in Psion's image apart from its device nodes, 6,145 are present and byte-identical. Every difference is listed in the release's PROVENANCE.txt:

• Safety. The NAND /home line in /etc/fstab is commented out, the six flash-writing tools (flash_eraseall, flash_lock, flash_unlock, flashcp, nandwrite and nanddump) are removed, and eject.sh will not stop the disk the system is running from.
• Fixes for Psion's bugs. "Back up your information" now copies settings, contacts and documents, including the hidden ~/.gpe directory. "Synchronise with a PC" now says that the program was never finished, instead of failing silently. The idle-sleep daemon's control directory is created at boot. See Bugs in Psion's own image.
• Find new software. The TASKS entry Psion left without a command runs RetroTechCollection's catalogue, after a 34-byte change to Psion's launcher; Psion's copy is kept on the card. The programs below are recorded with Psion's package manager, so Find new software lists them as installed and can remove them. A Spotify app is not in the image, but is one install away. See PsionLX Software.
• Applications Psion did not ship, from fifteen packages taken whole from the first edition, each checked to run on Psion's libraries: Jotter (Figment), Time Tracker, Audio mixer, Bombs (xdemineur), Go, Lights Out, Othello, Play and Record (Soundbite), Plucker, Program manager, Sokoban, Telnet, Tetris and Watch, and WLAN Config in the Control Panel. Bombs, Jotter, Play and Record carry the names of the EPOC applications they stand in for.
• Psion's Agfa fonts. The sixteen faces Psion's recipe installs, from the build tree, with a font-matching rule that keeps the desktop's own text in Bitstream Vera, so that Psion's gtkrc is left untouched.
• By request, the Media Player's idle picture is the PsionLX logo rather than GNOME's stock image.

The safe image, psionlx-cf-1gb-soho-safe.img, is Psion's root filesystem with exactly three changes, each marked with a comment in the file it touches: the NAND /home line commented out, the six flash-writing tools removed, and eject.sh made to leave the system disk alone. Everything else, Psion's bugs included, is as Psion left it. Its PROGRAMS screen is Psion's: 22 programs in four groups, which is the screen in the Pulster photograph plus Database.

The archival image, psionlx-cf-1gb-soho-original-ARCHIVAL.img, is Psion's root filesystem byte for byte, with Psion's own kernel and initial ramdisk. It exists so that Psion's work survives in a form that can be written to a card, and it behaves as Psion built it to. Its ramdisk runs any NBLXLoad.sh on the card's first partition (the card has none), then looks for the root filesystem in the internal flash before the card, and once the system is running it mounts NAND partition 1 as /home. On a Windows CE machine those mounts are expected to fail harmlessly, because the flash filesystem driver will not erase a partition that holds none of its own data, but this has not been tested. Do not boot the archival image on a machine whose Windows CE you want to keep.

The hardened boot image

The full and safe images boot the CF kernel image built by fuchs@gibson on 25 March 2005, the kernel that has run PsionLX from cards since 2005, with only its initial ramdisk changed. Its /linuxrc mounts the root filesystem from the card's second partition and nowhere else, and no longer runs NBLXLoad.sh. Psion's NAND-first original of that script, which fuchs's ramdisk kept as /linuxrc~, is removed, and so are the flash_eraseall and nandwrite tools and the JFFS2 module. JFFS2 is a module rather than part of the kernel, and on this machine it is needed only to mount the internal flash, so nothing on the card can mount the flash at all.

The kernel and its start-up code are byte-identical to fuchs's, and fifteen 4 KB pages inside the ramdisk differ. Before the tool that writes the image was trusted, it had to reproduce the stored checksums of all three surviving kernel images and of one of Psion's BooSt scripts. The hardened image is 3,638,067 bytes, MD5 4930a4dc5f9a898a8f1236e0ee583800. On 4 October 2026 it booted the full image on a real netBook Pro to Psion's desktop, with Psion's Xepson X server running under fuchs's kernel. If a card does not start, copying fuchs's unmodified image onto the boot partition as nBkProOs.img restores the proven kernel (see Writing and booting the card).

Psion's libraries

Psion's image runs GTK+ 2.4.13, GLib 2.4.7 and Pango 1.4.1. The first edition ran the community root filesystem's GTK+ 2.6.3, GLib 2.6.3 and Pango 1.8.0, and 46 library families differ in version between the two. A script that models the dynamic linker settled which stack to use. For each program it checks that the program and every library it loads, taken together, define every symbol any of them needs:

Programs with unresolved symbols

Tree	Programs	With unresolved symbols
Psion's image	315	0
The first edition	309	11
The full image, on Psion's libraries	327	0

The first edition's eleven were real faults. Database (Gaby) could never start, because its GTK 1.2 needs X input-method functions that the community X library lacks, and Printers could never start, because its libgnomecups came from a later Debian release and needs a GLib 2.16 function. Both run on Psion's libraries. The full image therefore uses Psion's whole library stack, and every program added to it was checked against that stack.

What Psion's image corrected

Psion's image showed where the first edition had been wrong:

The first edition against Psion's image

The first edition had	Psion's image has
A red power button, drawn in code	An orange 20 × 20 image, with a second image for its pressed state
The tab strip drawn as rotated text	Three images, one for each selected tab
A rebuilt watermark, and stand-in icons for Calculator, Contacts and To-do list	Psion's own watermark and icons, with 25 more icons
A button bar configuration file, /etc/gpe/buttonbox.conf, which was invented	/etc/gpe/button-box.apps
Gaby named "Data"	"Database". The clock is "Alarm clock"
The theme forced with -theme psion in the Matchbox session file	The theme chosen by the XSettings key alone
The interface font pinned to Bitstream Vera	Psion's generic Sans, which is safe because Bitstream Vera is the image's only font
F1 mapped to keycode 0x08, from the build tree's keyboard map	F1 mapped to 0x92. F1 did not work on the first edition's card
Psion's module list from the build tree	A longer list that also loads the iptables modules and sl811-hcd, the USB host controller driver
A setuid /usr/bin/apm	A 178-byte wrapper around a setuid apm.orig
The XSettings font quoted as Sans 7, with a blue background setting, both from the community root filesystem	Sans 8, and no background setting
Psion's launcher, button bar, watermark, override icons, TODAY and TASKS pages and two GNOME themes listed as lost	All of them, in the image

Two of the first edition's diagnoses were wrong. It said the power button could not suspend the machine because Linux ignores the setuid bit on scripts. In fact Psion's apm is a wrapper that calls the setuid apm.orig, and the community root filesystem the first edition was built on had lost that bit. It also said that every driver on Psion's module list was built into the kernel, so a missing /etc/modules did not matter. The check behind that claim scanned the kernel and its initial ramdisk together, and found the drivers' names inside the ramdisk's module files. Every one of them is a loadable module, so until the first edition added the list on 30 September, its cards never loaded PPP, Bluetooth, IrDA or SD/MMC support.

Bugs in Psion's own image

The archival and safe images keep these as Psion shipped them, except where safety needed a change.

Faults in Psion's image of 4 January 2005

Fault	Effect	In the full image
backup.sh runs cp -a "${HOME}/*" with the wildcard inside the quotes, so it looks for a file named *, fails, and then reports "Backup Complete"	"Back up your information" copies nothing and reports success. The wildcard would also have missed the hidden settings directory ~/.gpe	Copies hidden files and My Documents
lx_sync.sh is missing	"Synchronise with a PC" does nothing	Shows a message saying it was never finished
The idle-sleep daemon runs as lx and cannot create /var/run/no-sleep in the root-owned /var/run	An error line at start-up. Idle sleep still happens after 300 seconds; nothing can hold it off, but nothing in Psion's image tries to	The directory is created at boot
The session script 90GpeAppMgr has no #! line	The session cannot run it. This is harmless, and in effect correct: the Matchbox session file starts the launcher anyway, so only one copy runs	Left alone
eject.sh stops the IDE card service on hda	On a machine booted from CF, hda is the system disk	Will not stop the system disk (also in the safe image)
/home is mounted from the internal flash	Unsafe on a machine booted from a card	Disabled (also in the safe image)
"Find new software" has no command	The task reports "This task is not yet implemented"	Runs Find new software (see PsionLX Software)

Card image layout

All three images, 1,024,966,656 bytes each

Part	Type	Start sector	Sectors	Size	Contents
MBR	-	0	1	512 bytes	Partition table, signature 0xAA55. CHS fields use 16 heads and 32 sectors per track, the geometry BooSt expects
Partition 1	0x06 FAT16, bootable	2,048	143,360	70 MB	Label PSIONBOOT. nBkProOs.img, the file name BooSt looks for, a 279-byte nBkPro.img (see below) and README.TXT
Partition 2	0x83 ext2	145,408	1,856,480	906.5 MB	Label PSIONLX. The root filesystem

The ext2 filesystem is made with a 1 KB block size and with the resize_inode and dir_index features turned off, because the 2.6.9 kernel predates both and refuses the filesystem otherwise. /home/lx belongs to uid and gid 1000, as Psion's recipe sets it. The desktop runs as lx, and any settings left in that directory override everything in /etc from then on.

Check the boot partition of any image built before 29 September 2026. Until then, partition 1 of both first-edition images also carried nBkPro.img, 300 bytes. That file is the LX BooSt script, and it holds the commands nand -ignore erase 18 ee8 and nand partition e8, which erase the internal NAND and repartition it with the LX prototype layout. When a card holding nBkPro.img is booted, BooSt loads and runs the script, as a 2010 boot log shows ("Loading "/cf0-0/nBkPro.img"... Load BooSt script ... Load completed successfully"). It did exactly that on RetroTechCollection's own netBook Pro, erasing Windows CE, which had to be restored from Psion's restore set. A standard netBook Pro partitioned that way cannot reinstall Windows CE until the NAND is repartitioned (see The development machines for the value). The script was removed and both images rebuilt on 29 September 2026. The community's CF installs of PsionLX put nBkProOs.img alone on the FAT partition.

Current images carry a different nBkPro.img, 279 bytes, whose only command is load nBkProOS.img run. It contains no nand command. BooSt runs a file of that name from an inserted card when the machine starts from cold, so this one makes the machine boot Linux from the card even when Windows CE is in the internal flash. An nBkPro.img of 300 bytes, or any that contains a nand command, is the LX script: delete it before booting. The commands follow a 256-byte header, so tail -c +257 NBKPRO.IMG prints them. On 4 October 2026 the boot partitions were also cleared of the orphaned clusters the deleted script had left behind, and of an inherited README.TXT that told readers a standard machine "needs 7e8".

Writing and booting the card

Use a CF card of 1 GB or larger, and check the image against its SHA-256 before writing it. On a Mac, find the card with diskutil list external physical, unmount it without ejecting, and write the raw device:

diskutil list external physical          # check the size matches the card
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
sudo dd if=psionlx-cf-1gb.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=4m status=progress
diskutil eject /dev/diskN

On Linux:

sudo dd if=psionlx-cf-1gb.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

On Windows, use Rufus, balenaEtcher or Win32DiskImager in "write image" mode with the whole card selected, and decline Windows' offer to format the card afterwards. The image is written raw and overwrites whatever device it is pointed at, so confirm the device name immediately before writing. On a card larger than 1 GB the extra space is unused until partition 2 is grown and resize2fs is run on it.

To boot from the card, the netBook Pro has to be told to load its operating system from CF rather than from the internal flash. Forum members describe doing this by resetting the machine and holding Ctrl+D+Esc, or Ctrl+D with the On key, while it starts; one notes that "pressing the reset button and the ctrl-D-ESC keys in the right timing can be tricky, so don't give up". The 279-byte nBkPro.img on the card also tells BooSt to load the card's kernel when the machine starts from cold. With the card removed, a standard machine starts Windows CE as normal. BooSt's own supervisor mode, which uses a different key combination and a resistor across two dock connector pins, is described in the Psion netBook Pro Documentation and the 2007 guide cited below.

The first boot is slow. Before the desktop appears, Psion's image finishes configuring 22 of its packages and generates the machine's SSH keys, which takes several minutes with only the splash on the screen. Both happen once. Later boots go straight to the desktop, which opens on the TODAY screen.

If a card written from the full or safe image never gets past the splash on its second boot, or never reaches the splash at all, the hardened kernel can be swapped for the original one: copy 3-PSION-SOURCES/original-images/nBkProOs.img_cf.fuchs-gibson-20050325 from the release onto partition 1 as nBkProOs.img. That kernel's ramdisk also looks for the root filesystem on the card first, but it still carries the flash tools and would run an NBLXLoad.sh if one were on the card. Never put a file of that name on partition 1.

Do not tap the card-ejector applet on the archival image. Psion's eject.sh stops the IDE card service on hda. On Psion's machines, which booted from internal flash, hda was the CF slot. On a card-booted system hda is the disk the system is running from. The full and safe images carry a version that will not stop it.

Building it

The three images are built from Psion's archive in seconds, without root privileges, by scripts in the release's 4-BUILD-SYSTEM folder. A Mac cannot extract a Linux root filesystem faithfully as an ordinary user: tar drops setuid bits, applies the umask, cannot give files to other users and cannot create device nodes, and mke2fs -d copies whatever the host's tree holds. So a script reads the archive's own listing and writes debugfs commands that create the 59 device nodes and set the mode, owner and group of every other entry, and the image builder applies them last. Seventeen of Psion's entries carry setuid, setgid or sticky bits, among them the apm.orig that the power button depends on.

The first build of both soho images had no /dev at all. Excluding ./dev/* from the extraction also excluded ./dev/ itself, the device script began with cd /dev, and every node landed in /. Neither image would have booted. The emulator caught it, and the builder now refuses a tree without /dev and checks that /dev/console, /dev/null and /dev/fb0 exist in the finished image.

Each image's root filesystem was checked entry by entry against the listing of Psion's archive, for every file's type, size, mode and owner, and every program was put through the link check. The safe and full images were booted under qemu-system-arm and photographed. Psion's X server, Xepson, needs the Epson display controller that QEMU does not have, so the test copy of each image, never the image itself, borrows an Xfbdev X server that links exactly the same libraries. Each tree is fingerprinted, and a fresh copy of the release rebuilt all three trees to the same fingerprints. The card images themselves are not bit-for-bit reproducible, because mke2fs writes timestamps into the filesystem, so a rebuilt image should be checked by its tree's fingerprint rather than by its checksum.

Compiling programs, which only the first edition needed, has to be done natively. The netBook Pro's userspace uses the old ARM ABI (OABI, ELF flags 0x00000002), which no current cross-compiler produces, so the first edition compiled inside a Debian etch arm root filesystem booted under qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb, using GCC 3.4 for C++ because the device carries GCC 3.4's runtime library. That build environment is in the release.

The first edition

The first edition, of 30 September 2026, rebuilt PsionLX from Psion's build tree on the community GPE root filesystem of March 2005, the one forum members had booted since 2007. Where Psion's file survived in the tree it was installed unchanged. Where only Psion's recipe and patches survived, the program was rebuilt from the exact upstream release Psion pinned, with Psion's patches applied. The launcher, button bar, watermark and menu icons, all lost until the image was found, were reconstructed and labelled as such inside each file. The first edition's tree is kept in the release, and the full image's added applications come from it.

With Psion's launcher and button bar lost, their layout and shading were measured from the photographs. The only images of PsionLX running were hand-held photographs of a glossy panel, so each row of a photograph was divided by the page white at the same height to remove the lamp's gradient, and the display was rectified onto an 800 × 600 grid and checked against sizes known from the code. The rebuilt launcher used those measurements: a tab strip 26 pixels wide, tabs 101 pixels tall, and group labels in Sans Bold 7 on a #c2def1 band. Psion's artwork, found afterwards, has a strip 26 pixels wide, and the measured geometry was right to within a pixel or two. The colours, the button bar's configuration and the power button were not.

Some faults found while building the first edition apply to any system built for this machine. Faults that concern only the first edition's substitute programs are recorded in the release's PROVENANCE.txt.

Faults that apply to any build for the netBook Pro

Symptom	Cause	Fix
No button bar, default theme and a plain blue desktop, all at once	/home/lx owned by root, so user lx could not create its settings. The ownership script walked the macOS host tree, which carries no target uids	Set /home/lx to uid and gid 1000 and verify it in the built image
Plain blue desktop	The blue is Matchbox's root window colour #1f00a2, visible only when the launcher has died	Treat it as a sign the launcher crashed
No button bar or launcher; "Fatal: no entropy gathering module detected"	No /dev/random or /dev/urandom device nodes, so libgcrypt aborted	Create the nodes
Changes in /etc have no effect	A leftover settings database in the home directory. gpe-confd reads the /etc defaults only when the user's database is empty	Ship an empty home directory
A PCMCIA network card is detected but no driver binds	/lib/modules, a link into /initrd, had been replaced with a real directory. /initrd is empty in the image but filled at boot, and holds every module the kernel shipped	Restore Psion's link
The power button does nothing	The setuid bit on apm.orig lost when the root filesystem was extracted	Take modes from the archive's listing, not from an extracted tree
Last row of the PROGRAMS screen hidden under the panel, intermittently	With several font families installed and no fontconfig cache, GTK's generic Sans could match a different family from one boot to the next, and rows set in Arial Narrow are 8 pixels taller than rows in Bitstream Vera. Psion's image avoids this by having Bitstream Vera as its only font	Pin Sans to Bitstream Vera when other fonts are installed, as the full image does

Downloads

The release is published in the RetroTechCollection Archive at archive.retrotechcollection.com/PsionLX. As published it is about 5.4 GB in 97,080 files, and it holds the three card images, Psion's root filesystem, Psion's recovered sources and boot images, the complete build system, and the reference material. The software library is a separate folder, described under PsionLX Software. Start with README.txt, which carries the warning about the internal flash. WHAT-IS-EVERYTHING.txt describes every part, and PROVENANCE.txt records where each file came from and every difference between the images and Psion's.

Two things are left out of the release on purpose, because they damage other people's machines: an older image whose boot partition carried the LX NAND script, and a Windows CE restore script that repartitions the flash with 7e8, which on a standard 32 MB machine leaves Windows CE unable to start (see The development machines). Only the 540 script ships. The LX script itself is kept, under a name BooSt will not run, and a check run on every build of the release refuses to finish if anything able to write the internal flash is present in a form BooSt could run.

Folders in the release

Folder	What it holds	Size
1-IMAGES	The three card images, how the three differ, and instructions for writing them to a card on macOS, Linux or Windows	3.07 GB
2-WINDOWS-CE-RESTORE	Psion's Windows CE restore set and the BooSt scripts that run a restore. Needed only if the internal flash has been erased. The full and safe images do not touch it	42 MB
3-PSION-SOURCES	Psion's root filesystem exactly as found, Psion's developer archive, the OpenEmbedded build tree and patched 2.6.9 kernel unpacked from it, the boot images and root filesystems listed in Recovered files, upstream source at the versions Psion's recipes pin, and Pulster's netBook Pro documents	597 MB
4-BUILD-SYSTEM	The scripts that build and check the images and the software library, the full image's tree, both boot partitions and the hardened kernel, the analysis of Psion's image, the source of Find new software and the Spotify app, and the first edition's tree with its Debian etch ARM OABI build system	1.50 GB
5-REFERENCE	Screenshots of the images running under emulation, Psion's launcher artwork, the photographs, Psion's companion CD, the BooSt dongle guide and jLime 2012.3	123 MB
6-PARKED-ORIGINALS	Files the first edition replaced, kept so that every substitution can be checked or reversed, and Psion's six flash-writing tools, removed from the safe and full images	45 MB

The main files are listed below with direct links. Check a download against its SHA-256 before writing it to a card, with shasum -a 256 on macOS or sha256sum on Linux. SHA256SUMS.txt at the top of the release lists every archive, image and document in it; source and filesystem trees are covered by the archives that contain them rather than file by file.

Main downloads

File	What it is	Size (bytes)	SHA-256
psionlx-cf-1gb.img	The full image: Psion's system with the additions and fixes above. This is the one to write to a card	1,024,966,656	dc27e37cf1bff8acaf491a7da8e4e4e838c265d5cb115f8f666c7d7f928379b3
psionlx-cf-1gb-soho-safe.img	Psion's image with the three safety changes only	1,024,966,656	741c463992c76009d839395f83ac4030fa9b559c77f5ddab943d4e5d9d735a65
psionlx-cf-1gb-soho-original-ARCHIVAL.img	Psion's image and kernel, unmodified. It mounts the internal flash: for preservation only	1,024,966,656	82c769ccca75329a72b5620299cb77ea03451f8f0043f0d9e0bffdad1ac34fae
soho-image-netbook-pro-20050104074212.rootfs.tar.bz2	Psion's root filesystem of 4 January 2005, exactly as found	36,911,573	baa176ff06dcda9d58e86e17f76be3f19e63edbf791515cbea9111e22a0ae11d
netbook-linux-sources.tgz	Psion's developer archive, as recovered	106,074,940	a14b7d2e87217fdc2f5d32752a00ca0959ae5b1f312a6116d1a895d248edf08f
nBkProOs.img.psion-autobuild-nexus-20050104	Psion's CF boot image of 4 January 2005, which the archival image boots	3,613,045	88dcfa0ab10750b76ed251b919ee66db5395ac2be379ae81abd6ede7b4e4b890
nBkProOs.img_cf.fuchs-gibson-20050325	The community CF boot image of 25 March 2005. The full and safe images boot it with a hardened ramdisk, and it is the fallback if that ramdisk fails	3,659,808	bc640360e58d858b2d260450e20621adc93cb51e0fcccadaf2a97f415099bd1b
nbpce-404-int-20051129.zip	Psion's Windows CE restore set for the -404 International model, dated 29 November 2005	20,991,819	461b875c92141668f421caf78ace54bdad8214b66ddb6965f0177972f01710f8
1000999D.ISO	Psion's netBook Pro companion CD of November 2004. Windows software and the user manuals	30,750,720	7d646c2841cfbdd1f636814bb0129339ba7cb7e88b7d2e74f8a5c87862d5c967
jlime-xfce-image-2012.3-netbookpro-20120311.rootfs.tar.bz2	jLime 2012.3 with XFCE. Not PsionLX	88,409,659	ce14633797a2d4562ecdfb07db19974b8417df43bc96bed9595e43ac3f9060fc

PsionLX Software

This section documents RetroTechCollection's own work, and is cited to its release files and source code.

Psion's TASKS screen listed "Find new software" in 2005 and gave it no command: tapping it showed "This task is not yet implemented" (see Bugs in Psion's own image). In October 2026 RetroTechCollection wrote the program the task was meant to run, and a library of packages for it to install. The library, PsionLX Software, is the PsionLX-Software folder of the RetroTechCollection Archive. It holds everything the full image adds to Psion's, and a Spotify app, as packages for Psion's own package manager, so a netBook Pro running any of the three images can install them. The full image has Find new software on its TASKS screen already, and its added programs on record as installed.

The netBook Pro cannot fetch from the archive itself, because its secure-connection support is twenty years out of date. PsionNet, running on a Mac, a Linux PC or a Windows PC on the same network, fetches the files over HTTPS and passes them to the netBook Pro unchanged.

Find new software

"Find new software" shows a catalogue of the packages with icons and descriptions, and installs or removes them with Psion's package manager, ipkg. Its icon is Psion's own, drawn for the task in 2005 and taken from Psion's image. It is written for GTK+ 2.4 and GLib 2.4, the versions Psion shipped.

• Running it from TASKS. Psion's launcher has the task in its table with an empty command. Installing Find new software replaces the launcher with a copy that differs by 34 bytes, so the task runs the new program, and only if the launcher on the card is Psion's exact program. Psion's copy is kept in /usr/lib/psionlx-software and put back if Find new software is removed. The full image has the same change built in.
• Root access. Installing needs root. PsionLX's root password is empty, so the program runs a helper that does nothing but run ipkg, through plain su, with no prompt. Psion's own gpe-su cannot do this, because it waits for a password prompt that su never shows when the password is empty, so it is used only if someone has set a root password. After each change the launcher is told to re-read its programs, and new programs appear in PROGRAMS straight away.
• Finding PsionNet. At each login a small script, psionnet-connect, finds PsionNet by a UDP broadcast and writes a proxy auto-configuration file that Firefox follows: the web goes through PsionNet when it is on the network, and straight out when it is not. Creating ~/.psionnet/manual stops it changing Firefox's settings.

Installing

1. On a Mac, Linux PC or Windows PC on the same network, start PsionNet with Device set to netBook Pro (PsionLX, network) and note the address it shows.
2. On the netBook Pro, open Terminal (PROGRAMS, OTHER) and type su, then, with that address, wget -O - http://192.168.1.4:8080/lx/install | sh. The installer points Psion's package manager at the archive through PsionNet, installs Find new software and says "Done". The desktop blinks once as the launcher restarts. On a card made from an earlier full image, which has the programs but no record of them, it records them as installed.
3. Tap TASKS, then Find new software, choose a package and press Install.

Without PsionNet, the games, tools and fonts can still be installed by copying the .ipk files to an SD card or USB stick and running ipkg-cl install on each as root. Find new software and Spotify are no use without PsionNet.

Packages only add files: none replaces one of Psion's, apart from the launcher change described above, and removing a package takes its files away again. The internal flash is never touched.

The packages

PsionLX Software, 4 October 2026

Name	Package	Version	Group	What it is
Find new software	psionlx-software	1.0	System	The catalogue described above, and the login helper that points Firefox at PsionNet
Spotify	psionnet-spotify	1.0	Sound	Liked Songs, playlists, search and playback through PsionNet (see below)
Bombs	xdemineur	2.1.1	Games	Minesweeper, named after the game on Psion's EPOC machines
Tetris	gpe-tetris	0.6-2	Games	The falling-blocks game
Othello	gpe-othello	0.2-1	Games	The counter-flipping board game
Go	gpe-go	0.05	Games	A Go board for two players
Lights Out	gpe-lights	0.13	Games	The light-switching puzzle
Sokoban	gsoko	0.4.2	Games	The crate-pushing puzzle
Jotter	figment	0.3.5	Tools	An outliner for notes and lists, named after the EPOC program
Plucker	gpe-plucker	0.2	Tools	A reader for Plucker e-books
Watch	gpe-watch	0.10	Tools	A clock face
Time Tracker	gpe-timesheet	0.16	Tools	Timers for jobs and tasks
Program manager	gpe-taskmanager	0.17	Tools	Lists the running programs, to switch to or close
Play and Record	gpe-soundbite	1.0.5	Sound	Voice notes, named after the EPOC programs
Audio mixer	gpe-mixer	0.40	Sound	Playback, recording and microphone levels
Telnet	telnet-session	1.0	Internet	A telnet client in a terminal window
WLAN Config	gpe-wlancfg	0.2.7	Internet	Wireless card settings, built from Psion's patched version, which Psion's image does not include. It appears in the Control Panel
Psion's Agfa fonts	agfa-fonts	1.0-r6psionlx1	Fonts	The sixteen faces Psion's recipe installs. It replaces Psion's empty package of the same name, and keeps the desktop's own lettering in Bitstream Vera

Each package depends only on packages in Psion's own image, worked out from the libraries its programs use. The script that builds the library, mkfeed.py, refuses a package that would need a library Psion's image lacks or would overwrite one of Psion's files, and the full image is built from the same definitions, so the two cannot drift apart. The packages are in the format Psion's own build produced, and ipkg checks each one's MD5 checksum before installing it. The folder's SHA256SUMS.txt lists every file; all of them matched the hosted copies on 4 October 2026.

Spotify

The Spotify app is not in the full image; it is installed from Find new software. It browses a Spotify account's Liked Songs and playlists, searches, and plays music through the netBook Pro's own speaker. PsionNet does the part a 2005 machine cannot: it runs a Spotify Connect speaker called netBook Pro on the computer and streams the sound to the netBook Pro as MP3. The app finds PsionNet by broadcast, and plays the stream with the GStreamer 0.8 already in Psion's image, through mad and Psion's sound server. It needs Spotify Premium. On 4 October 2026 it played Spotify on a real netBook Pro, which ran at a load average of about 2 while playing. The details are on the PsionNet page.

Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB. Neither program is made or endorsed by Spotify.

Source

The source of Find new software and the Spotify app is on GitHub at RetroTechCollection/PsionLX-Software, under GPL-2.0-or-later, with the jobs that compile both in the release's ARM OABI build system and the script that builds the library.

Other Linux systems for the netBook Pro

PsionLX was not the only Linux for the machine, and the others are better documented.

The Familiar and GPE images of 2005 were built outside Psion and hosted at linuxtogo.org, using a rebuild of the same 2.6.9 kernel. They are the images the 2007 forum thread began with. An OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 image for the machine, dated August 2006, was hosted there too.

OpenEmbedded later gained a netbook-pro machine configuration and a 2.6.17 kernel recipe built from patches published in Koen Kooi's directory at linuxtogo.org. The configuration assumes 32 MB of flash and creates the /initrd directory the boot image needs for its pivot. Ångström test images were built for the machine by 2007, among them Angstrom-x11-image-glibc-test-20070710-netbook-pro.rootfs.jffs2.

jLime 2012.3 included an XFCE root filesystem for the netBook Pro, dated 11 March 2012, and a port of the Linux 3.x kernel to the machine by tworaz appeared on GitHub the same year. In July 2026 fss-hacks reported building Tworek's 3.2.9 kernel with period toolchains, and found the boot-code part of that work incomplete.

See also

• PsionNet, which connects PsionLX's Firefox to the web, serves PsionLX Software and plays Spotify
• Psion netBook Pro
• Psion netBook Pro Documentation - Psion Teklogix's user manual, quick start guide, specification sheet and BooSt supervisor-mode note
• Psion netBook Pro Troubleshooting Guide
• Psion netBook Pro General Maintenance
• Psion netBook and Psion Series 7, the EPOC predecessors