One thing. I very quickly tested the boot console and it worked very well.
I still have to prepare a keyboard file for my German layout, but that should take 5 minutes (when I find them

More importantly: I exited the console by typing "exit" (is this the recommended way?).

Then I got the whie screen with blue "NOKIA", but after a while (maybe 10 seconds, wasn't too patient..) nothing happened, so I turned it off and then on again. For the first time (I think) I was welcomed by a very nice date/time set-up screen (I think I didn't even have that when I bought it, I'm not sure).

The questions are:
1. what is the recommended way to exit the boot console?
2. what does exactly /etc/init.d/minireboot do?
3. is my internal clock battery already dead? (phone is ~8 months old).

The most important is (2) above. If minireboot is not reliable, then I guess I'll change it to poweroff or equivalent.

Alternatively, it might be nice to jump back to /sbin/preinit to boot normally, but I'm not sure if preinit needs some initial state that is not the same as when the recovery console exists.

Any ideas?