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Archive for the ‘Maemo’ Category

Just what I was looking for…

March 17th, 2007

Plankton - An excellent theme - very clean & elegant … and a nice looking email client.

I gave Claws email a try before setting up the default client… but since they are being ported from a desktop base, the toolbars/menus occupy much of the reply window’s screen. This default email client (picture above) is as simple as it gets & seems to be very effective to me! A few more mouse clicks (on the menus) is much better than constantly hiding the keyboard to check what you have typed.

Mutt… was a bit too much to set up - when my pizza & Mickey were waiting for me

Posted in Maemo, N800 | Comments (3)

Dual booting your N800

March 17th, 2007

Dual booting your N800 has many advantages…

You can always have a backup of your original OS (on the flash)
When booting off the Memory card, you have full 1/2 gig at your disposal!
Experimenting with distros like sardine is worth it!

So… how to go about it? A few tips for you - so that you dont have to spend those reckless 7 hours like me

I have an N800 so I can only speak about this device… but with what I’ve read & seen on the #maemo channel, N800 uses the rootfs method while the 770 uses the initfs method.

As a thumb rule, we need to follow this guide - http://www.maemo.org/platform/docs/howtos/howto_dualboot_bora.html

…except copying the rootfs part. I tried copying the rootfs (maemo-sdk-rootfs.tar.gz) but was unable to get it booted up! So I followed the tar/untar method described at http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HowTo_EASILY_Boot_From_MMC_card - this method gets you an exact replica of your N800’s filesystem - very good considering you already had lots of settings on your device.

So in essence, this is all what you have to do (I had 1 gig card in my internal (inside the cover) slot)

Procedure…

Create an ext2 partition on your memory card - I also created a 100 megs swap - use cfdisk or gparted (your choice)
insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.18-omap1/mbcache.ko
insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/current/ext2.ko
mkdir /opt
mkdir /floppy
mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /opt #—-> this is your memory card’s ext2 partition
mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock4 /floppy #—-> this is your current rootfs
tar cf - -C /floppy . | tar xf - -C /opt
umount /floppy /opt
shutdown -h now
Connect your N800 to your Linux box using USB (do not poweron/charge right now)
flasher –set-root-device mmc
Insert the charger into N800 & you will see a success message
Reboot your N800

Some points that you need to take care about…

Use GNU tar - busybox’s tar had an issue with copying file paths which have more than 100 char length. You can find GNU’s tar from http://penguinbait.com/tar.gz
Use ext2 file system - I had read on InternetTabletTalk that journaling filesystems are bad for the memory card.
You dont have to format the memory card from the device itself. Just insert the card, connect the device via USB, unmount the card on your computer (if its automounted) and then use gparted/cfdisk to partition it.
When copying files from the flash device to the memory card, omit the “-v” option in tar. By not using the verbose option, you will speed up the copy process by almost 50%.

How to temporarily boot from internal Flash? - Just remove the memory card while booting up. Thats it!

How to Undo the stuff…

Connect your N800 to your Linux box using USB (do not poweron/charge right now)
flasher –set-root-device flash
Insert the charger into N800 & you will see a success message
Reboot your N800
The device will now boot from the internal flash in future.

My device

Good luck

Posted in Maemo, N800 | Comments (2)

Wohooo… finally!

March 17th, 2007

Managed to get the dual boot working perfectly!

Expect a How-To first thing tomorrow morning!

A big thanks to [s-ndh-c]

Posted in Maemo, N800 | Comments (0)

Just an update…

March 17th, 2007

Its been more than 6 hours at a stretch that i’m trying to dual boot the N800 - planned to get stable Hildon App Framework (HAF) running from flash & get Sardine (Bleeding edge HAF) running from the mmc. But after first trying the initfs method my device was rebooting endlessly!

Now am giving the rootfs method a last shot (this time with GNU tar)

I’ll post my results tomorrow morning… right now, i’m bit too tired from staring the 2 monitors from past 6 hours!

PS: The guys on #maemo have been really helpfull - specially [s-ndh-c]

Posted in Maemo, N800 | Comments (0)

Ping Pong on my N800

March 14th, 2007

As Laurent mentions here in his post to maemo-users, getting ping/telnet/traceroute to work without resorting to install a new busybox package is easy. Infact, here is the data.tar.gz file in question (N800 dosn’t has “ar” & I was planning to do all of the mentioned steps on my device itself).

Ping on my N800 - in action…