Well I know of two uses for that I think... It's for OTA upgrade and second one is for kernel-power-flasher. But I'd like to know if I can enable/disable R&D with that flash as it would really be handy for development. That way I won't be running to a PC in case i'm in need of R&D

I already told you, it's for kernel upgrades OTA (that was introduced in PR1.0.1 (44-1 iirc)) so the kernel can be upgraded with the application manager.

Oh and there's an app to enable R&D mode on-device, it might bork your cal, but it seems to work fine (thanks qwerty12 - whichever community you're in right now).

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37915

Thanks for that mohammad never thought such app exist But is this app safe enough with consistent disable/enabling of R&D mode? You see I maybe a programmer but I ain't that advance with regards to linux. Specialy maemo

But the kernel-flasher package uses /sbin/fiasco-image-update (which is part of the softupd package) to do that. If flasher can update the kernel when it is run on the N900, what command do you use to do it? Because when run it expects to connect to a USB device.

I've reflashed the N900 kernel from onboard the N900 using this on-board flasher. That's easily doable, and instructions are lying around. I've never tried to flash the rootfs and mmc with it... I suspect doing those things might just put your device into a bootloop, but if you manage to keep everything needed to finish the flash in-RAM, and don't write ANYTHING to your partitions in the meantime, you may be able to pull it off.

As for implementing it from withing BackupMenu, I suggested it to Robbiethe1st, but I am not sure if he's had time to look at it. You can also mount rootfs and/or mmc from within BackupMenu's command line / terminal - so there's no reason i can imagine why you wouldn't be able to reflash completely from within BackupMenu, in spite or what MohammadAG said about NOLO (which I admit I don't fully understand, which means I may be missing something important).

I do wish that Nokia made fiasco-flasher freely distributable - it's a bit easier to use than the softupd + flasher combo, and it could thus be more easily placed in BackupMenu - it's less versatile, but by the same token it's also more likely to fit the kind of recovery you'd do from BackupMenu - reflash the kernel partition or the fiasco image - pretty hard to make N900 unbootable from the MMC alone, so little need to reflash that from on-board in most cases.

- Edit -

Remembered my reason for posting this: When we (me and some other folk over on one of the uboot threads) were fiddling with flasher for a while, we noticed it didn't work for enabling R&D with the --local flag. So you can't really do that, unless someone figured out how to do it since then.

Slightly OT. but how would flashing be different from restoring a clean image from BackupMenu?

I mean, if someone would flash their N900 and the upload the backup, how would that image restored be different from flashing? Does flashing work with compression? Does it check for anything?

Flashed images seem to to be much smaller that the untarred filesystem.

cat the script, it's a wrapper (with some added things I don't care about so didn't read ) for the flasher binary.

NOLO (the bootloader) does rootfs flashing, that's why you get a green bar indicating progress, flasher-3.5 simply sends the image, and NOLO writes it to /dev/mtd5 (don't write to this directly, you'll cause problems!).

Flashing anything other than the kernel will return an "Unsupported in current mode"-ish error.

An off topic question mohammad seems like you know something I'm looking for a ever since I got n900.
Do you know of some way of clearing all the kernel logs on /dev/mtd{I forgot the number}? And also restoring back to factory default all the configurations of n900 located on /dev/mtd2?

Thanks, I should have at least checked that before asking, I checked to see if it was a symlink, checking for the possibility of it being a wrapper script must have slipped my mind. At a quick glance it seems to use flasher in conjunction with softupd.