The question I have for people asking about booting to Ubuntu, Fedora, Android, etc, is, "why?"

If you just want to do it "because you can" then good luck and God speed. I understand that urge (I have it too), but I'm not interested in that result.

If you want to do it because there's something that Ubuntu / Fedora / etc offers that Maemo doesn't, then what I wrote above applies.

I totally understand your "why" question, why would you want to run it on its own rather than have debian and device functionality at the same time.

I suppose I am half "just because we can/could" and the other half is "why can't we".

I was just wondering why we actually can't just do it the way I descriped, what was actually stopping us i.e drivers not being available etc etc

For me, personally, I wouldn't mind rebooting and booting from a completely seperate OS. At the moment I am using my phone as a phone and laptop as a laptop. I don't really mind having the two seperate (OS/Phone functionally), it's just great to be able to have one device in my pocket that does both

Please don't get me wrong I think easy debian is brillant and I know how much effort and work from you guys it takes. I will defiantly still install it from fremantle devel and try and help out with some testing/bugs.

I was just asking about another solution, trying to learn a bit more

Because the N900/N8x0 contain very different hardware from your PC or laptop. these guys are making the equivalent of an Ubuntu boot CD - once they have finished that, you will be able to do just what you described.

Modern systems are very complex beasts and booting them properly and safely is a difficult and involved process and one that - once perfected - is mostly hidden from users.

davedickson: check this: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36011

I am not a developer, but here are a couple reasons that i could think of:

1. You want to have a seperate OS to run all of your -devel and -testing applications on, instead of risking the partition that is set up how you like

2. you need to have a very application specific distro that is designed for one thing, like backtrace is for security testing. in fact, you might want several of these, and i think it would be cool to have a thimblefull of microSD cards that can make my n900 fix any computer problem, but i don't necessarilly want all those apps and processes installed and running at once.

You missed what is likely the real reason, the reason why a lot of off the wall or 'pointless' projects exist ..

To see if / Because you can.

That's a major one, but qole had already covered it ;-)

Oh, so he did.

There again, my reading of his post indicates that he believes that this reason is pointless. Whilst I agree with him that as far as I can see nothing really useful can come of it, I am well aware that many big breakthroughs come through people ignoring conventional thinking and just doing things that cannot possibly be useful.
A good example springs to mind a number of years ago where some Finnish student decided to pointlessly start his own little project rather than simply learn about operating system principles by studying Minix like everyone else

If they can't get it to work, they will have learned that they can't and if they do get it to work, they will have at least climbed a not insignificant intellectual mountain; and if they manage to or lay the foundations for someone else to produce something spectacularly different then we will all be indebted to them.

what i get asked alot from people with iphones is can you jailbreak this thing which makes me laugh. they actually mean can you get cydia and installous or something like that.

i do wonder if an installous equivalent for maemo will come out for hacked ovi apps lol

1/ Yes, it would be beneficial indeed to have the ability to boot into a separate environment that you aren't afraid to screw up.

2/ This is a very weak argument, and I quite disagree. Backtrack is an idiot's tool and is simply a collection of pre-installed packages, it is not unique in any way. I truly believe any distro can be used to do "security testing" (Oh and by the way, I'm a security expert and have yet to encounter anyone using backtrack "in the field" -- most pen testers I know use RedHat or Debian modified to fit whatever they need to do). Again, if this is more of a 1/ issue (having a separate environment which doesn't impact the original environment), I can understand it to a point.

This being said, had you done a tiny bit of research, you would've known that Nokia themselves are looking into this. It's part of the Platform Security discussion which was given during the Maemo Summit, where Nokia is looking how they could enable third party distributions to load on the N900 while being "secure" (meaning, using some technology allowing anyone to sign their distros, etc).

Long story short, you're battling your own fight -- Join the war.

This being said, I realise Elena's discussions are aimed at the long term (Maemo 6). I have no doubt that long before that, we will have someone porting the bootloader to work with the N900 (bootloaders worked fine on the N8x0, Mer is fine example of this).

In other words: Yes, it is possible to "jailbreak" the N900. Yes, it is possible to install another OS on it. Yes, it is possible to boot from an SD card.

Are there tutorials available? I'm not aware of any. Has there been any work into this? Probably, but it hasn't been publicised yet. It will come -- let us not forget most people haven't had access to this platform for very long. Patience, my friends.