The diff between Harmattan & kernel.org 2.6.32.39 is 4.1MiB/143K lines, draw your own conclusions.

What the...
Who needs to patch the kernel that deeply?

I have successfully decompressed and mounted the rootfs.lzo. Here is the script to uncompress it. This gives you a regular ext4 image. Should work with the other lzo images, but this is not tested.

Also you need python-lzo installed. It isn't packaged for Ubuntu, but the required liblzo2-2 is in the standard repos.

http://al.robotfuzz.com/~al/maemo/unlzo

Thanks, it does work pretty fine

To get oberhumer's python-lzo to work on Ubuntu's lzo2, you'll need to apply this patch.

Drop the generates lzo.so in the same folder as the python script, and "python unlzo.py rootfs.lzo".

EDIT: Bad news: The N950's ... unique MMC structure is apparently hardcoded into system files.
Even after setting up the correct mountpoints, Harmattan sputtered and failed, and it clobbered Maemo 5's filesystem.
Used the MeeGo Kernel 2.6.37-29.1. Needed a full reflash to restore everything.

Directions: WARNING THIS WILL CLOBBER MTD5 (aka ROOTFS) -- IT MAY OR MAY NOT CAUSE DAMAGE TO YOUR MTD1 (aka config) and MTD2 (syslog?) PARTITIONS.

(1) Run ali1234's unlzo script.
(2) Make sure a SD card is partitioned into a 2GB ext4 (p1), a 2MB linux-swap (p2) and 32MB vfat (p3)
(3) Mount and copy MeeGo CE's uboot boot files to the vfat partition. Save MeeGo's /lib/modules/{KERNEL} folder (via cp-a) somewhere on your desktop. Unmount MeeGo CE's image.
(4) Copy (cp -a) Harmattan's system to the ext4 (p1) partition on the SD card.
(5) In Harmattan's /lib/modules , remove it's kernel and the "current" symlink.
(6) Copy MeeGo CE's modules folder into modules, and ln -s the folder to "current".
(7) Edit /etc/pmconfig (!)
(8) Edit /etc/fstab (mmcblk0 is the SD card when booting from SD, so edit accordingly, and use mmcblk1p3 as the swap partition.)
(9) Unmount everything, connect SD to N900.
(10) flasher-3.5 -l -k vmlinuz-{KERNEL} -b
(11) ??? Watch dmesg
(12) Break Fremantle

You might have more luck using the Harmattan kernel (but probably not..) You'll have to extract the zImage, of course.

I'd be interested as to how these figures were calculated - when I ran a diff (minus the Documentation folder, which adds a fair few thousand lines itself, and the debian folder) I got 521,171 lines and a filesize of 15.2MiB..

As for why they patched it so deeply, the changelog provides quite a bit of info (all 4000+ lines of it!)

Anybody get anything good from harmattan running on the N900? I got nano copied over, runs fine. It actually doesn't segfault when searching like the maemo5 version does, so it's an improvement there. I tried meego-terminal and linked in all its dependent libs, but seems there's too big of a Qt version mismatch.

And note that Harmattan seems to use hardfp so any binary using floating point will surely die because of illegal instruction or something like that.

++

Someone should try chrooting and running apps on MeeGo CE for N900.