@Estel and @Mentalist Traceur,

FWIW, my goal is to re-work (hack) /sbin/preinit so that it loads fbcon first thing and then displays a menu (before doing anything else).

The menu (perhaps compiled using slang so it looks nice) would allow running a root console, running backupmenu (or perhaps a "customized" version of it, since I don't like the whole text2screen stuff) as well as booting Maemo.

As a sub-goal I would also like a console with everything loaded except X. This way you would have everything mounted, udev running, charging, etc, but all in pure text mode (basically a multi-user runlevel w/o X).

But first things first , I need to sort out the date/time, plus I need to compile the German kmap!