Quick question (from someone who has never had an internet tablet), can you boot from the microSD card on the N900? As in the same way you can boot from say usb or second hard drive on normal laptops?

There was a post to boot N8XX from SD, so I think you will be able to for the N900 too.

Yeah, had a quick look at:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=19639

...so I guessed it would be possible, was just looking for a definative answer from one of those lucky guys who already has one

We probably have to wait for the 300's to test this for now or we have to wait to get out own

lol yeah its been that way for a while! Just want to get my hands on one so I can find out this stuff for myself rather than asking all the time!

N900 boot procedure is different than previous devices so bootmenu will need changes, initfs partition is not used in N900. I am waiting for N900 (from developer program), I am not one of those lucky 300. Anyway, booting from memory card will be possible in one way or another.

The easiest is to put bootmenu to current rootfs somewhere in the beginning of boot sequence. Disadvantage is that you need rootfs to be relatively OK to boot. Or currently there is unused initfs partition (at least in these pre-release devices) but this it is just a leftover and is wasting space so I guess it will go away and we cannot rely on its availability. Or it could be possible to attach small initramfs to kernel to boot even with completely broken rootfs.

That's great news. I think that booting from a card was one of the greatest innovations in the previous tablets. Even if the tablet was smashed to pieces all you needed to do was to put the card in another device and basically carry on where you left off.

Yes, see this post

It works by a patch to /sbin/preinit, which is the first thing the kernel runs. It does suffer from the issue of not working if rootfs is totally hosed, mentioned by fanoush. In that case, you can probably use a custom kernel and boot straight to SD.