Well the tutorial wasnt clear and i did everything on my n900 which caused a big problem in the partitioning for the ext3 instead of doing it on the memory card, i did it on the phone memory which took alot of space for nothing and couldnt install or do anything with the phone so i had to reflash it.

Oh, that does suck

Done all that before, and it shuts down.
Going to reattempt to do it

Hey guys i finished this the other night, like i said its slow because the 3d accel support has not been released yet, only one mer master has it on his n900 at the moment.

Edit * The absolute easiest way to move this mer.item and the firmware files to and from your n900 would be to use a ssh enabled ftp program with ssh enabled on your N900. If that doesn't make sense, use the steps below*

Steps below


They are very easy actually. I did it earlier, here is how

Step 1 - Install bootmenu on your phone

Open up the browser on your N900 and type this into the address bar http://bit.ly/N900bootmenu It will ask if you want to download or use app manager to open, just select app manager. The app will successfully install and then you need to go to your list of icons and select the one that says install bootmenu. A white screen pops up saying it has gained root access and then will ask you if you want to install, yadda yadda, it exits. You then need to open a text editor on your computer and paste this text into a new file::

ITEM_NAME="Mer (external SD, partition 1)"
ITEM_ID="mer"
ITEM_DEVICE="${EXT_CARD}p1"
ITEM_MODULES="mbcache jbd ext3"
ITEM_FSTYPE="ext3"
ITEM_FSOPTIONS="noatime,ro"

save the file as mer.item. Find a way to get this file onto your phone. Best way would probably be to use another sd card. After you have this file on your N900 you want to copy it to /etc/bootmenu.d folder. This can be done many ways but easiest would be xterm. Open up xterm on your phone and change your current directory to the one that has your mer.item file in it. Most likely it would be your sd card. The steps for copying it from sd would be...
Open xterm:

type "cd /media/mmc1", hit enter
then type "ls", hit enter

you should now see a list of all files on the root of your sd card, one of which should say mer.item

type "sudo cp mer.item /etc/bootmenu.d", hit return

You have now successfully completed the bootmenu install

Now before we go and format the sd card, we need to get the firmware files from the N900

In Xterm Type "cd /lib/firmware", hit enter

Type "cp * /media/mmc1", hit enter

You have now copied the files to your sd card. Now move them onto your linux computer and off of the card so we can format and install mer on it

Step 2 - format sd card

Easiest way to do this formatting thing is to use gparted. If you do not have gparted installed in your ubuntu (you did say you have ubuntu on your comp right?) then you can open xterm on the computer and type "apt-get install gparted", hit return.

After a few moments you will have gparted installed and you should be able to go to system > administration in the upper left of your screen and open gparted. up at the top and towards the right you should see a selector for your disk, pick the sd card (should say something like /dev/sdb). Up at the top select partition then go down to unmount. Go back to partition again and select format to > ext3. Click the green checkmark to apply the changes to your card. Your drive is now formatted in ext3

Step 3 - Mount and copy files


Open xterm on your computer and type "umount /dev/sdb1", hit enter

Type "sudo mkdir -p /mnt/mer", hit enter

Now type "sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/mer", hit enter

Now type "cd /mnt/mer", hit enter

Your current working directory is now /mnt/mer, and your sd card is mounted to that location. Now you need to untar the file you downloaded to the sd card.

In same terminal window from before type "sudo tar --numeric-owner -pzxf /home/user/Desktop/mer-armel-n900-rootfs-v0.17testing10.tar.gz", hit enter. I did read somewhere that you said you saved it to your desktop. Replace the word user with your linux user name (shows in upper right hand corner). This step should take a while...do not do anything to your xterm window until it returns an input line. And be sure to type everything exactly as i typed it in the quotes, including uppercase if present.

Once your xterm returns an input line it has finished installing mer. Last step is to take those firmware files from the N900 and copy paste them into the folder "/mnt/mer/lib/firmware" on your computer using the file explorer window. To do this just open up the file explorer and navigate to /mnt/mer/lib/firmware and drag and drop the .bin files from your N900's /lib/firmware folder...voila.

Type "umount /mnt/mer"

Waaait for it.

Remove the memory card when xterm is done.Turn off your N900, put the memory card in.

Turn it back on with the keyboard slid open

Select the mer line and wait

Many thanks Scott! I'll give this a go when I log onto main PC.

Just tried it, got the same result, when selected it thinks for about a minute then shuts down. Will re attempt when I get some more time.

Is the untaring part supposed to take long cuz i been sitting here for about 30 minutes its still doing it.

permission not allowed to copy firmware files from n900 to /mnt/mer/lib/firmware, can someone help with this?

kingzeus, did you try it with sudo in front of the cp ?

@ Scottprotege I did everything mentioned in your tutorial and the other tutorial before, and it does the same, N900 shuts down.
Not sure if R&D mode has to be enabled with some flags set but I'm assuming that it's not needed since Mer should handle the watchdog.
Edit: one more thing, the pointer shows up then it shuts down.