Okay, I fooled you. Not quite. But it would be cool if we could, wouldn't it?

I never go far without a bootable Linux Mint USB key. I have an old 4gb drive from 3yrs ago that is now my Linux key I call PocketLenny. (My N900 is NiNi. I name everything...)

What I got to thinking was what if Nokia allowed us to create a small partition to use as a bootable flash drive? Would that be something useful to any of the members? I'd love to give my PocketLenny away to a buddy and use my mobile as a bootable drive, and run a persistent Linux off of maybe a 5gb partition. I really don't like Windows much anymore, and have adopted Linux as my desktop OS of choice to match my mobile. Why can't my N900 become PocketNiNi?? All the ingredients seem to be there...

I'm sure the hardware wasn't designed for this, and may be impossible on the N900. But if it could be done, who would want it? And for all you hardware engineers, what limitations must be overcome to make it happen? Are they insurmountable issues, or something that shouldn't be hard to do?

I intend to take the response and idea and present it as a Brainstorm or some other way to get Nokia's attention if response is positive enough. I'm open to suggestions on how best to present the idea as well, as long as the data shows there is a desire for such a feature.

Yup, that would be a great idea...Personally I would put on that partition the equivalent of System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org). It has saved the day many times, especially on those pesky cluster nodes without CD drive

someone else is thinking on the same lines: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36356

This was one of the early ideas I had for my n900 as well, but the Ubuntu USB Disk creator warns that the n900 needs formatting.

I'm not too familiar with how USB boot works from a low level perspective, so I'm not sure what would be necessary to make this work on the n900, but it would be freaking sweet.

Fresh, booting Mint 8 from SD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCL50tJIKI

quite a boring video, but it works.
No real hacking, simple made a bootable card and run.

Should be also possible to do it on the internal memory, I will take a look at that when my exam is over

Haven't had a chance to check out your video yet, but sounds like you just set up an sd card to be bootable through some usb stick or something, and then stuck it in the n900 and was able to boot?

I just put a 16gb sd card in my n900 today, but had been planning on using it as a debian chroot, now im wondering if I could partition it to get a bootable ubuntu usb image, and a debian chroot

I have, a minimal archlinux installation on a samsung multifunction printer/scanner, I think there's no problem on doing the same on the n900.

I'm no hardware guru, but I think the disk would need a boot sector, or an 000001 spot, or whatever its called. Can't remember. School was so long ago...

What I'd like is to have a Mint/Ubuntu install as well as an optional VirtualBox so I could run it in Windows if necessary. Then I'd be the king of the universe.

That'd be cool but please change the title, its like me posting a thread saying "N900 emulating N64 at 60 fps!!!" and then the post just says lol jk but thatd be cool right???

[QUOTE=christexaport;421921
. Then I'd be the king of the universe. [/QUOTE]



Until windows boots...