Here is a video of N9 graphical tripleboot menu using evtap and modified init script:
http://youtu.be/bz-tRdC0IX4

Apologies for the really loysy quality of the video, it was shot on a friends Xperia phone under low-light conditions, but anyway the content here is more important than artistic execution

The example shows three icons;

• terminal (for sshd shell)
• nitdroid
• meego

but there is really no restricition on what type and how many elements are desired on the screen.

--- edit ---

BTW, the following article is generally related to booting N9 to different modes: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=86617

Any plans for sharing the scripts?

Thanks for the video!

I think it would be better if you could link the how-to thread that you had created earlier in your first post too...

The scripts & evtap executable are all the way open source, see my svn repo at https://toosa.swagman.org/svn/sillykbd/

There are the sources and some example scripts.
When I have time I will make a detailed tutorial on how to use these, but now I am a bit busy so it may take a couple of days time

The evtap thingy anyways is just a side project I tingled with, the main thing I am doing now is the sillykbd, a virtual input mechanism for pre-init environment. This just kind of came up by itself in the process

That's incredibly neat, and a clever solution to the N9 not having a good input device at pre-init stage.

I think this would go really well with a recovery initrd-type system, probably also using evtap for input.

so how do i install this? or any step by step?

Okay, the installation depends a bit on the exact setup you have on your device and that's the reason I have not made it into a package with installation scripts.

Basically you have couple of prerequisites; You need to be running open mode and you need to have nitdroid installed.
(well, if you do not have nitdroid or some other alternative OS in your device you would hardly require a dual boot anyways )
It's of course possible also to have Mer/Nemo as the alternative OS, or even as third OS in your device but I have not tested that yet.

So, imagine you have the nitdroid installation with sillyboot setup.
Then, additionally to that you need four other things:

• evtap executable as user interface
• images to show at boot time, that is PNG images of 480x854 size
• map file for evtap
• integration to the sillyboot script

Unless you want to design your own boot layout, you can use the image files provided with sillyboot or use the trible-boot images I have in the youtube video.

Of course the neatest thing to do is to design your own layout It is quite easy, I made the tripleboot image layout in GIMP in about 20 minutes...
You need to create the main bitmap, which shows all the icons, and then copy this to other bitmaps where in each you edit the selected icon as highlighted and others as grayed out. Then you need to create a map file for this bitmap, where you tell the corner coordinates of the icons. The sample map file contains info about the format.
Finally what is needed, is to upload these to your device and tweak your /sbin/preinit script so that this boot selector is called before children of init inherit the world.

You can find the needed stuff from my svn server, at https://toosa.swagman.org/svn/sillykbd/
Just "svn co" that and run make in scratchbox. The example images and map file are in the "simplemenu" folder. There is a working preinit file also in the main folder.

If it happens you do not have scratchbox installed, here is a pre-built evtap image: http://www.swagman.org/juice/evtap

As you can see from the preinit script, the PNG images and the associated map file go to "/root/juicemenu" on the device, and evtap goes to "/bin" folder.

seems like we will have to reverse showpng.
anyone have ideas about it? how to directly access to display driver...?

Just the other day I think I read a posting that somebody had rewritten text2screen as open source on N900. (or maybe it was on some of the previous generation tablets?)
Would that be of any help, do these devices share any properties of the display driver?

well, even pixel per pixel would be wonderful.
cairo is opensource so it can be used too