Thread: Possibility of OS other than Maemo 5 on N900?
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fanoush is offline fanoush
2009-12-29 , 00:05
Posts: 2,152 | Thanked: 1,490 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ Czech Republic
#45
Originally Posted by bdogg64 View Post
I have this loaded and working on my n900 as well, but I'm sure booting Maemo from an sd card isn't as simple as coping the root filesystem to the card. Are there any samples out there as adding bootmenu items?
Quick and dirty way:

- install bootmenu deb mentioned above (dpkg -i + clicking install bootmenu icon)
- rename /bootmenu.conf to something else (no need to make items then, there are hardcoded ones)

- repartition microsd to have at least two partitions, format second one as ext2 (beware of https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2747 , for me microsd is /dev/mmcblk1 after N900 boots but mmcblk0 at boot time)

- clone root filesystem to this partition like this

Code:
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mount --bind / /floppy
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mount -t ext2 -o noatime /dev/mmcblk1p2 /initrd/
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# cd /floppy/
Nokia-N900-42-11:/floppy# tar -cf - . | tar -xvf - -C /initrd
...
...
- now (optionally but preferably) disable /home mounting in mmc system and copy /home to mmc too

vi /initrd/etc/event.d/rcS-late
comment line
# /bin/mount /home || echo "Failed to mount /home partition."

and when you are at editing it you can add "umount /mnt/initfs" there to unmount previous ubifs root (possibly saves some RAM)

Code:
Nokia-N900-42-11:/floppy# cd
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# umount /floppy/
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mount --bind /home /floppy
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# cd /floppy/
Nokia-N900-42-11:/floppy# tar -cf - . | tar -xvf - -C /initrd/home
...
...
Nokia-N900-42-11:/floppy# cd
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# umount /floppy
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# umount /initrd
now reboot with keyboard open and select boot from external card partition 2, ext2


--bind mounts to /floppy are there to omit copying /proc /sys... for root system and /home/user/MyDocs for /home
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Last edited by fanoush; 2010-01-04 at 11:46.
 

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