So, i now successfully made a combined.bin file.
Now how do i perform the spell of endless possibilities in booting?
Im only familiar with booting kernels, not binaries...

As a first test try booting it without flashing (flasher -k combined.bin -l -b). If it works you can make it more permanent later.

i think it worked. When it rebooted, the phone had a commandline with tux on top left and it said loading kernel image or similar.
So, all i need to do now is find a suitable OS to try boot?
I have been thinking about it.
And this is my conclusion:
To use the OmniaHD version of Symbian would be the closest, hardware-wise. It has same hardware, and all OSs based on Symbian support a regular keyboard and arrows. The only thing i see missing is something to act as a menu-key.
But thats just a thought...
Important is: it works like a charm, at least the first part.

Well, we have some kind of liftoff on u-boot N8x0 (from serial console) - this is all thanks to ali1234, I'm just testing:

Receiving kernel (length 128256)
Image successfully received
SETUP: WR VND DEVICE req 82 value 0000 index 0000 length 0000
SETUP: WR STD INTERFACE SET_INTERFACE value 0000 index 0002 length 0000
Boot requested


U-Boot 2010.06-00700-ge564557-dirty (Sep 17 2010 - 14:27:44)

I2C: ready
OMAP2420-GP revision 5
TI H4 SDP Base Board + Menelaus Daughter Board + mDDR
DRAM: 128 MiB
## Unknown FLASH on Bank 1 - Size = 0x00000000 = 0 MB
## Unknown FLASH on Bank 2 - Size = 0x00000000 = 0 MB
Flash: 0 Bytes
*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Net: LAN91C95-0
OMAP242x H4 #

More magic on N800 from ali1234:

couple of days ago , i had a problem with u-boot , basically after flashing the combined image , maemo won't boot , the phone turns off after u-boot attempts to load the kernel , if no mmc was in.
later i discovered that this problem was with the combined image that i flashed , i don't know what is wrong exactly , i used the power kernel image v40 for the combined image
http://maemo.org/packages/package_in....6.28-maemo40/
extracted the zImage from the .deb and ran builder script .
the resulting image is 2 MB so it should be fine , and it gets flashed fine also..
well since the phone was useless , i had to reflash the kernel to the combined image using pr1.2 kernel .
it was hard to get the phone to flash , pressing u , while the usb cable is plugged in on reboot , did nothing , the phone still loaded u-boot .
after several tries , i got it to work , by removing the battery , plug in the usb cable while the battery is removed ,(yellow led flashes once) , press and hold u on the keyboard , put the battery back in .
the phone went into flashing mode , i flashed the new combined image and everything went fine.
i hope this helps somebody .
if someone got u-boot working using the power kernel image , please share how .

I have had other reports that power kernel does not work. I suspect this happens because the old old kernel used on N900 does not fully initialize the hardware itself. It relies on NOLO to do most of it. Anything that u-boot touches has the potential to be in a "wrong" state when the kernel boots. This can cause all kinds of problems. For example, it is the reason why usbtty is disabled. There are two ways to fix this, the right way, and the work-around which is necessary when dealing with vendor kernels:

The right way is to fix the kernel so it will reset hardware from an unknown state without crashing. The new new kernel used in MeeGo does this, and I have not had any problems with it.

If you can't fix the kernel, then the workaround is to make sure u-boot puts all the hardware back exactly as it found it. This can be tricky if you are trying to boot from MMC...

I just did, and it works without any issues. I created the image manually, not using the builder script. Did you try that:

padding u-boot to 262144 bytes.

Converting zImage to uImage

Concatenating both files together.

Perhaps you forgot to convert zImage to uImage? The builder.py script does not do this.

hi ali,

is there a way to give the watchdog from uboot a signal every once in a while(eg with every keystroke) so that it won't reset when not in r&d?

How to pass custom parameters to the the kernel located on the SD card?