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While it will be a little while before see Palm’s WebOS officially ported to tablet or notebook-style devices, it’s probably going to happen soon. In the meantime, you can sort of kind of do it yourself if you have an older PC.

Basically, Palm offers a WebOS emulator for Windows PCs. While the version of the operating system that runs on mobile phones is designed for ARM-based processors, the desktop emulator works with x86 processors like those used in Windows computers. So a member of the PreCentral Forums decided to see what would happen if he took the emulator image, threw it on a hard drive, and tried to boot his computer. It turns out, it boots.

It only works on hard drives with IDE connections, so if you have a SATA hard drive you’re out of luck at the moment.

There’s currently no support for mouse input, so you’ll have to navigate using a keyboard and touchscreen — if you have a touchscreen PC. And the user interface doesn’t scale to the size of your display yet. But the guy who figured out how to boot a PC from the emulator image is working on patches for those things.

You can check out a video of WebOS on a Dell Latitude C600 after the break.