Dualbooting meego from the SD in easy and safe way on the n900
 

Hi,

I'd like to have meego on an external SD card and I'm looking for a *safe* and *easy* way to boot it or eventually other OSs (possibly without installing bootmenu).

As the n900 is my daily phone I want to minimize the risk of breaking the main maemo installation, but do not have enough time to dig deeply in the next days.

May someone help me?

Looking at /proc/cmdline I see that the first system startup command is /sbin/preinit, that when the keyboard is open, check for the existence of /bootmenu.sh and sources it.

So the simple idea may be to create a bootmenu.sh file that kexecs the meego kernel without the need of the additional bootmenu package, am I missing something important that package provides? should that work?

As the filesystem is mounted in read/write I guess that the kexec call may leave it dirty and I would avoid any possibile race condition.

On meego wiki I see that before calling kexec they just "sync", why not mount -o remount,ro / ? is that not possibile?

If the idea is feasable it should be trivial to write a complete gui that manages a set of different bootmenu.sh files, and let the user choose the next boot OS (located on different sd partitions).

What do you think?

Any hints are appreciated!