I finally got an N800, only to discover almost everything I wanted to do with it more or less requires something newer than OS2008 Naturally, the first step towards getting something running is the kernel, and that's where it gets cloudy.

Basically, I have two options: 1 - Use the old 2.6.21 kernel with a whole bunch of userspace hackery; or 2 - Fix the mainline kernel, clean up the required patches, and submit them to Linus when I'm done.

Option 1 is obviously extremely difficult with Debian Sid and Gentoo, where you can't just downgrade udev to version 141 without breaking Xorg and a whole bunch of other stuff. Also, I really don't like the idea of installing dsme, bme, cal-*, et al from broken/old repositories - the only .debs I could find of those important packages (i.e., the ones required by b-man's Ubuntu port) are from the now-nonexistent Mer repository.

Option 2 is much more attractive. (No... really? :P) I've started work on gathering various patches and applying them on my mainline tree. Among the patches I applied are Stskeeps' N8x0 MeeGo patches (note to Stskeeps... you should have called them what they are - N810 patches. They don't work on my N800.), TSC2301 support (keypad and touchscreen - unfortunately I haven't tried to tackle converting the TSC2301 audio driver to ASoC yet, but I think the driver still works in its current form), and a few other random fixes.

I compiled a 2.6.35 kernel with everything I think is necessary for the N800, but what do you know - it doesn't boot :P It's pretty random in how it decides to not work - sometimes it will go into a reboot loop, sometimes it just shuts off. One thing is consistent with this kernel, though - the backlight is definitely on for about 30 seconds (the screen is black, but clearly still on) before it shuts down/reboots/crashes. I can't debug it without a framebuffer console or a way to save the kernel log somewhere so I can read it on my desktop, but I did notice the USB Ethernet gadget driver is recognized on my desktop a few seconds before the N800 shuts down.

If anyone here could give any hints on booting this kernel (or should I say, if anyone here cares anymore :P), I would greatly appreciate it. If I can get just one person to show interest in my work so far, I'll have no choice but to set up a GitHub for my patchy kernel tree...