Just FYI, N900's internal battery that preserves time settings gets weaker as time goes on. So while it SHOULD hold enough charge to be certain of correct date, it starts prompting you for date/time confirmation a lot sooner if you compare brand new N900 to an N900 used for a year or two. It does seem to keep the time accurately for a while though, as it takes a while for it to reset the date - usually on my device it prompts you even after a quick pull-in-out of battery, but time and date is the same as it should be if the battery wasn't out for long.

Framebuffer on kernel power v47 (and v48) is enabled by "modprobe fbcon". I personally have it inserted at the (almost) very beginning of /sbin/preinit - I have it inserted after line 28 in that file. Gets framebuffer module loaded early enough to see the getbootstate stuff.