Thanks Halftux, this thread should be mentioned in wiki for easing of firmware upgrade: https://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_firmware .

I recently bought a used N900 in quite good state and last weekend I tried to flash it and restore from my older N900 via backupmenu.

Gosh, such an afford to get all the necessary tools, firmware files and information together. When I was finally through the whole procedure I thought, everything needed must be kept in one place.

So I use this useful thread to present a live image iso with all my stuff collected at my "just flash a N900"-project ...

https://www.magentacloud.de/share/xoaa7kitfk

* It is actually a standard Ubuntu 16.04.2 32bit Live DVD image - no passwords needed
* It contains the flasher tool AND latest firmware files for flashing N900 (rootfs and emmc)
* Standard Ubuntu desktop environment (english), with easy switching to other languages and keyboard layouts
* Terminal has the two complete flasher commands in bash history
* Links on desktop to short notes (local txt files) on how to flash and how to switch lang and keyboard
* Firefox with locally cached tabs for all bookmarks I found useful when flashing and restoring a N900

The iso image is quite big , 1.7GB (of course, the original Ubuntu image alone is 1.5GB).
But some people might prefer this to the small one by Halftux, where the firmware files must be searched and downloaded as an extra step.

The image was build with Pinguy Builder (which is preinstalled and configured) and everybody can extend it and build its own live iso image. An external disk with a unix file system is needed. All temp files and the final iso itself go there into one directory (the path to that dir has to be set in Pinguy Builder), so at least 5GB space ist needed. All user files and settings must be copied to /etc/skel before the build is started. From that dir the home dir for the live image user is generated during boot.

For booting off that iso I recommend setting up a multiboot usb stick https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...boot_USB_drive (different live iso files can be booted and the stick can still be used for fat32-data, no partitioning needed) .
And if GRUB2 is used as the bootloader on a computer, then it might even be possible to add a menuentry in grub.conf with the path to the local iso file in the line "set isofile=/..." . See the Ubuntu example menuentry ...


I hope my "new" N900 will last a while so that I don't need that iso for myself in the near future . But it might help others ...

Cheers, Ulle