Sjgadsby and Stskeeps, thank you very much.

I'm happy now.

Well, from in-November, I'll help Mer.

I have just committed the remaining puzzle piece of N900 bootmenu (thanks to fanoush for developing this fantastic software - has come in so handy so often for myself)

If the output of "dpkg -s getbootstate" shows Version: 1.0.35+0m5 on your N900, you will be able to multiboot.

WARNING: This is only for the very daring and you should have a FIASCO image ready for reflashing and have your data backed up before even considering to try this out.

fanoush: should we consider pushing this into Fremantle Extras-devel after a bit of polishing?

The package can be found at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~cvm/bootmenu_1.6_armel.deb and you need to dpkg -i it as root. You need rootsh installed.

For those who try it out - have fun multibooting your N900!

Some advices for those booting non-Maemo systems: Get a watchdog kicker very early in the process - this isn't handled magically for you by DSME like on 770, N8x0. It is a standard Linux watchdog interface. There's R&D flags to disable watchdogs.

It's November now. Are you ready?

Before that, I finished the software I write at this moment.

But what planned it for Mer, in the future?

I would love to have some beta testers trying to figure out why the keyboard doesn't work in Debian LXDE on the N900...

oh, totally missed this thread until today, thanks for pointing it in another thread
well, go on if it works for someone :-) I won't help much until I get the device.

My ideas about bootmenu for N900:

if it will live in rootfs I plan for it to be very initfs like i.e. self-contained. It should have its own busybox environment (statically linked and/or using uclibc) and live in its own place (/boot, /initfs, maybe even chrooted) so it will work even when someone thinks apt-get (dist-)upgrade with busybox removal and libc upgrade is a good idea.

Most of the time the breakage is either messing startup sequence later in the boot order or apt-get upgrade mess. 'rm -rf' moments or flash filesystem corruption is not so likely. And having it self-contained could help with putting it somewhere else too (own initfs partition if possible, built into kernel as initramfs). When based on N8x0 uclibc initfs environment we could also have same build of all the recovery tools embedded in bootmenu for N8x0 and N900.

I've just tried this on a production n900 (the ones that were just shipped) and it does not work.
Menu is displayed, but any choice leads to a device shutdown.
I've got the "out of the box" partition layout.

Fortunately, the device boots properly if the keyboard is closed so i've not bricked my n900 (yet)

Yeah, the keyboard closed this is your way out Does it even do it if you select -and launch- Internal flash?

Prod me on IRC and we can debug it.

Problem occurs only when the device is plugged on the USB cable, so it's not really an issue. Otherwise it works fine ... but i've only tested it with internal flash :-)

And thanks stskeeps for the help on IRC.

So were you able to boot debian or what?

Bootmenu does not work for me. I've edited preinit to see what was the problem. It seems kernel modules for mmc card are not loaded at that time (even if i try to insmod them manually). I don't even see anything about them in dmesg (if I save it's output to file at that time). And if i try to copy lsmod output to file it results empty file at that time. And there are no mmcblk* in /dev.
What modules and in what sequence should be loaded for mmc support at boot time in preinit?