Four friends and 6 NiTs are constantly look onto me as Nokia support for 1 and half years! These are all dedicated palm user, 100% useless in tablet environment!

In the past, 'they' can have uptoday fun stuff ONLY if they either physically shipped me the tablet or physically visit me in person, otherwise their tablet are as old as stone age! Teach them to install apps or upgrade or doing anything is like a bomberang. It always came back to haunt me and costed me more trouble than worth it. NOT ANYMORE, started from last week, I started to send them copies of SD, bootable clones, and all they have to do is to carefully insert into the SD slot, make a backup 1st, then they are running a tablet just as good as bunanson, BlueMaemo/rotation/MMapper/Tear/Digiatscene/gvm/OpenSSH(!)/WorldTV99 and, most of all, they all have the one button backup. In the past, I am frustrated, installed an app, messed things up, the tablet will have to redo from the ground up. NOT ANY MORE, we will exam any interesting apps, backup, install, not like it, re-clone from backup. Now, it is a new era for me, my tablet can only go FORWARD, no more ******ed start from ground zero. And of course, the 6 Nits plus myself are ALL running the same clone, maintanance and questions or problem solving is million times easier since we are ALL looking at the same screen under the same environment. This is modern age tablet! Long gone stone age!

Edit: Forget to brag a little bit, over the years, 2 more friends have bought the N810 and 1 bought N810WiMax, they never bother me, They are alright with the windoz, but .... I guess they just use it like a calculator? It is pretty fast for a calculator. Some of these people, they own a condo at washingtonDC, they are not at the same league as you and me, I guess.... in other words, 400-500$ electronic gadget does not work as it look, just put it aside and forget about it. Ummm.....I should call her up and ask whether I can 'borrow' that nokia wiMax thingie she got in October if she is not using it.....



bun

Could you send me one too. Remember don't delete your account on Pidgin so I can log into your account too.

I like your idea of one click clone too. I might have something like that to clone the flash to SD and back, SD to SD with clicking only (using dialog like PB's)

I really really hate to send off personal computer stuff, no matter how hard you try, there is always something slipped off. They ALL got my grandcentral number, I have politely asked them NOT to use it.

I never use Pidgin, what is that? Some kind of chatting? for banking stuff, I go right to the webpage. The tablet is almost a business tool for me, I use it in my profession, the gnumeric/skype/tear.

Edit: the floppy disc icon is the one touch backup, really should be from Nokia. the two p2 are the same, both are 634880 and are of different capacity. one is 8G and the other one is 16G.

bun

Pidgin is for chatting and it stores passwords in the clear. For Grandcentral you always log out before clonnning for friends. Gmail, sip accounts are the same you should delete accounts before copying.

Here is a script which does not try to partition the SD anymore. But it supports cloning the SD back to the internal flash. Because it needs ~ 256MB free space to create a temporary file, called rootfs.jffs2, on the mmc1 (external SD) you should be beware of that. You also make sure your source SD / directory less than ~500MB [do not put too much data on the SD after you have it cloned from your flash ( you can check with df command ). This SD should be a saved copy for you only]

Note that: A big partition may only contain a little data. The script at this moment doesn't really check for size of data, it only checks size of the partition..

It turns out the mmc1 and mmc2 DO NOT have to be the exact size, similar size works too, and the bigger size does NOT get bigger with every copy. I have tried with 730 MB copied to 650 MB (source is larger than target!), it went thru and the result copy stays the same after several back and forth copy, i.e., they stay as 650 MB and 730 MB. Same size is still the easiest to manage, a slight difference is also fine. I do know, if the size difference is too large (?), it will then copy to your tablet infFlash and mess things up. Bottom line, same size is easier to manage, a little difference, even the source is slightly larger then the target, it is alright.



bun

Worked, thank you nhanquy!

Reverse cloning from SD to intFlash using clone.txt.

This example, A) make a fresh clone from intFlash to MMC1 from parent tablet
B) boot from mmc2, clone from mmc1 to intFlash of daughter tablet

Prerequisite:

1) Daughter tablet should already booting from intFlash, MMC1, MMC2.
2) Parent tablet should have at least 90 MB space on intFlash
3) SD clone: at least 600 MB Fat32 space on partition 1 of mmc1
partition SD clone ext2 to ~ 500MB for a Dana 4G SD,
sfdisk /dev/mmcblk1 -uM
0,3361,0C
,,,
return
return
ext2 = 489MB
reboot
format Fat32 partition
xterm
root
umount /media/mmc1
mkdosfs /dev/mmcblk1p1
no need to reboot
no need to format ext2, the clone.txt will take care of it.
4) dl clone.txt to default /home/user and make it executable
xterm
mv clone.txt clone.sh
chmod +x clone.sh
have e2fsprogs installed.
apt-get install wget
apt-get install e2fsprogs
A) Parent tablet boot up from intFlash, clone to MMC1. IntFlash has 94 MB free from 256MB space. This was cloned successfully on to SD with 489 MB ext2 partition.
B) This SD clone was then inserted into daughter tablet MMC1, external SD slot. And the daughter tablet booted from MMC2, and was successfully reverse cloning back to intFlash of the daughter tablet. Now parent and daughter tablets are running the exact copy. It took 9.5 min.
This compares favorably with reflash the tablet and install ALL the apps from ground zero!

For some reason, the daughter tablet was 30 MB space more on ext2 partition than the parent tablet, and the screen rotation does not get copied, I have to manually install it. Other than that, the two tablets are running exactly the same.

The SD clone that transfer the OS from parent to daughter tablet should have ext2 partitions ~500 MB in order for the reverse clone NOT to overflow.

This is both practical and fun.

bun

What do you do first once you got a fresh tablet?

If you never ever touch a tablet before, you should just play with it and fine tune to your likeness, manually. It is enjoyable and you got to know your tablet much more.

Well, if you already have a tablet, and now got another one (How is a tablet better than your wife/husband? A tablet would not jealous when you pick up another tablet!), what is the fastest way to make your tablet work the way you want them to? reverse CLONE!

This is a fresh tablet.
1) wifi: enable BT, copy wifi key from any BT source.
2) enable extras-devel
AppManager>menu>Tools>>App catalog...>
New>
Extra devel
http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/
(blank)
free non-free
3)install rootsh, emelfm2, bootmenu
This is the key step. Once you get to bootmenu and able to SDboot, you are back to ALL you favorite tools, repositories, bookmarks, essential apps.
4) move map from mmc2 to mmc1
5) insert mmcboot to boot to mmc1
6) reboot, clone from mmc1 to mmc2 to make mmc2 bootable

Edit: Cannot partition IntSD on the N810. xterm>root>umount>sfdisk crashed. Tried for 15 min with various combination, it kept on crashing...looked like it is going back to buy.com
Edit: on the way back tomorrow morning
Edit: Problem fixed, http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...ht=losing+data, thread #71

7) boot up from mmc2, reverse clone to intFlash. Done. Success! Took 9.5 min. Happy endings, just like any fairy tales :-)


bun

Tell her there is a buyer up the road who will take it off her hands in a heartbeat, I am dead serious.

The reverse cloning procedure is successful. However, installed/reverse clone of an N800 to an N810 is problematic. It hiccuped a lot and crashed. Apparantly it is OK to stuck in a N800 clone to N810 for mmcSDboot. I have yet encounter any problem in doing that. But to reverse clone, that is like flashing your tablet, there are some subtle difference between the two units, that is why there are two different copies of the flash image from Nokia, the RX34 and RX44.

Bottom line: To do reverse clone, i.e, clone from mmc to intFlash, better to stick with the same model, i.e., N810 to N810. It is OK to interchange mmcSD boot between N800 and N810, no ill effect observed over several months.

bun