I am out of town with horrible internet.. I will try fedora this weekend and report back.

thanks much...would be great to get this going.

So this is what I did..

Worked fine.

Note: Everything above after a # indicates a comment, not necessary in the command.

My partition scheme is different than standard. I have repartitioned my 28GB or so space into /home, with only 2GB in /home/user/MyDocs as FAT. So, for most N900's, you'll want to download the tar file either directly to your /media/mmc1 or to /home/user/MyDocs which is what Jebba's suggests at his page.

/media/mmc1 is mounted to wherever you want your Fedora Rootfs to be. You can put this on any EXT3 formatted area.. just untar the tar.bz2 to it and change the mount --bind /dev/ to point to the dev/ directory under your fedora root point.

This gets you a barebones, totally basic, chrootable Fedora. Recommended is to look through Qole's easy debian chroot scripts which mount many other useful (and in some cases necessary) directories other than just /dev for an even more usable chroot environment.

Either way.. the rootfs work fine after you remove the __db* from /var/lib/rpm (not /var/lib as was suggested earlier) and mount the /dev of your Maemo over the $ROOTFS/dev directory.

ETA: Also note.. I used all standard commands in Maemo above. No qchroot or qmount, or gtar... etc. I installed bzip2 and wget from the repositories and just used standard chrooting.

You guys may be trying to leap before you can crawl here. Start from the basics and work your way up to Easy Debian-esque. Some of the stuff in qchroot or whatnot be unnecessary here. I haven't looked through qole's scripts in a long time to remember everything he does in there but it could be some paths are different in Fedora to Debian or some mount-points unneeded, or PATH variables to different locations, or whatever, that are/could be causing you some headaches.

With barebones you mean command line only?

Mostly.

A quick scan through this default rootfs shows nothing X-related really.. so I went to install firefox and it wanted to get 84+ packages. Too lazy right now.

Chances are, from previous experience, it'll probably launch X apps but it will most likely look funny and not be very "integrated" into the Maemo environment.

That is mostly, I believe, what the "Easy" Debian is all about. Chroot is just chroot and works fine.. but integrating it into the host environment takes a little more work.

extendedping, I believe, was just trying to get a basic fedora command line going first. This does it.

He should have kept insisting on a Fedora + Gnome 3 beta . I might test your instructions on this weekend.

I imagine Gnome 3 Beta through chroot would be extremely slow . You would probably have better luck with a booted Fedora at that point...

I know it would be snail slow; just keeping the expectations higher. You might never know what you be getting in the end

Fedora + XFCE or LXDE should be very workable. That's back to Easy Debian-esque territory.

dumb *** (me) was doing rm -f _db (one underscore) not rm -f __db*.

well I will read your writeup tonight fatalsaint (and much thanks), I was able to run rpm --rebuilddb now but yum update still failed. I suppose once I can dig into your instructions it will work. again much thanks.