With Easy Ubuntu/Mer on the horizon, it was time for me to try out console tools.
Using pbeasy worked great -- eventually. :-)
What I hated were the lack of instructions for use with the N800 OSK (ex. hours wasted not knowing that I had to select/deselect using the spacebar). Actually one of the pb menus does mention using tte space bar, but I only read that after losing all hope. :-(
I used pbeasy to partition, but found pb more flexible for cloning.
Having no command line experience to speak of,
I dared not (yet) try to figure out partitioning with pb . . .
And then beeing in pb I used it for handling bootmenu and swap file.
So far I found the menus in pb/pbeasy self explaining.
But I lost the bootmenu all the time till I thought of searching for a reboot command
instead of power down/up . . . (those newbies..)
I have not tried backup/restore yet.
Having overcrowded my uncloned N810 a bit with lots of apps I made a fresh start with empty mmc:s.
So I experimented a lot with pbeasy and pb and these apps helped me understand what was going on behind the scene.
( And then I finally dared a few attempts to install+clone Mer 0.9, well the last posts in that thread explain a bootmenu problem, and I learned a bit . .)
Questions :
How to make more than three partitions on an mmc ?
( I read a comment somewhere in ITT about editing a file pb uses (??), but can not find it.)
Can one have two bootable partitions with e.g. diablo and mer on the SAME mmc ?
( if this is the wrong place for questions just ignore them and I will repost them )
This is THE moment for me to thank PenguinBait for his outstanding work!
While I wasn't successful on my first try using PB due to:
- operator error
- "missing manual"
- Had to update the bootmenu stuff to allow timered autoselection of bootpartition
the experience still was immensly joyful (took me perhaps 30 minutes to finally get it right):
a) I felt somehow "in control" on this machine again (aka Master of Disaster).
b) Having cloned to a 1 GB partition of the internal flash gives a LOT of space to install additional apps and makes the N810 so much more useful.
Lessons learned:
- Not any partitioning works (for me to get it working, I had to make partitions on the internal flash mmcblk0, the first one a W95 FAT32 (LBA), the second one a Linux ext3)
- Take care to really select an option... (press SPACE)
The "missing manual" was probably the worst part. In between outdated posts here and old wiki articles, the currently relevant information got lost (at least for me). Having a proper doc on a homepage somewhere would have helped a lot (perhaps it even exists but I didn't stumble over it) - especially as the "concepts" are probably murky for many of us who don't have an extended linux background.
First my overall opinion on pbeasy: Great Work! Thanks!
I used pbeasy for partitioning, formating, creating the bootmenu and cloning to the internal memory and to an external SD (Sandisk 8 Gb Class 6 Micro SDHC). It was easy to use and both clones are working fine so far.
Only the swap-file was not aktive in both cases.
To enable the swap partition (on the created partition on the same memory like the clone) I had to use the "swap"-item of pb according to http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...&postcount=168
Worked fine.
With pb I also managed to create an uncompressed backup of the internal flash and the internal memory on a separate SD-Card (Sandisk 2 Gb micro SD, formatted with ext3).
Noob here. Got my n810 in February, started researching alternate booting/OS options the following week. Tried PB Easy last week, and had no probs what-so-eva! My setup:
Started from clean/latest OS 2008 install via 770Flasher
Installed all apps/tools and config'ed device to my liking
With this setup, I've preserved the OS setup/config on the internal card (in case I ever need to restore it), while I use and experiment with the n810 booted off the external card.
Thank you Penguinbait. PB Easy is definitely easy (once you do your research to understand what actually occurs when you use it).
I haven't been able to get it to install as of yet, despite numerous attempts...must be a user error on my part, but will comment once i figure out what's going wrong. That said, wish there was a bit more if you see this, then do that...type of documentation for the parts most likely to bring about an error. Thanks for the hard work anyhow...back to trying
?Additions? 
Add rotate / high speed kernel installation