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This page helps you getting started with MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition for N900. Installing Community Edition (CE) on your N900 will nullify your warranty, and is meant for developer use only. Here we introduce the simplest and most recommended way of installing Community Edition on your phone, if you are looking for a different approach then look at the bottom of the page for alternative approaches. The recommended installation method will install MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition as a dual boot with your Maemo 5 fremantle operating system.
WARNING: Remember that installing Community Edition (CE) on your N900 will nullify your warranty, and is meant for developer use only.
Follow these steps to install MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition to your N900.
WARNING: You have to use PR 1.3 version of Fremantle and nothing else
Uboot is required for booting to Community Edition, or alternatively to your original operating system.
If this installation didn't work for you, try the manual installation of U-Boot.
When inserting the microSD memory card in the card reader, you need to find out what the proper device for the card is. You can also plug the N900 into your computer's USB slot using the package provided cable. Make sure the external microSD card is unmounted, as with most modern linux distributions today it will get auto-mounted if the has a valid filesystem (FAT32 or ExtX). To unmount, you can try this example:
sudo umount /dev/sdX
And use the mount command to determine if/ where it is mounted:
sudo mount (for an example how the microSD would look go MountOutput here.
Finding out the device node can also be done with for example fdisk:
sudo fdisk -l
An example output (NOTE: The /dev/sdX is used as an example on your PC this might be also called /dev/mmcblk0, /dev/sdd or something else)
$ sudo fdisk -l ... Disk /dev/sdX: 3965 MB, 3965714432 bytes 194 heads, 30 sectors/track, 1330 cylinders Units = cylinders of 5820 * 512 = 2979840 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0001ab40 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdX1 1 588 1708984 83 Linux
NOTE: The .raw image contains the partition table as well. So the image needs to be written to /dev/sdX not /dev/sdX1.
After you are 100% sure that the /dev/sdX is the microSD memory card you just inserted in the card reader, you can use for example dd to put the image to the card:
$ sudo dd bs=4096 if=<raw_image> of=/dev/sdX
If you are low on disk space, you can use
$ bzcat <raw_image>.bz2 | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sdX
to decompress the compressed raw image on the fly without having to unpack it on you computer first. And if you have pv(1) installed, you can add it in between to display the progress (the image is ~ 2GB in size as of 2010-10-04):
$ bzcat <raw_image>.bz2 | pv | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sdX
The dd does not show any progress until the file is written to the device, so be patient.
dd will output:
328356+0 records in 328356+0 records out 1344946176 bytes (1.3 GB) copied, 105.625 s, 12.7 MB/s
After this, you can insert the card in the N900, and start using MeeGo Community Edition on your N900.
You can use MeeGo Community Edition on your computer by emulating it with your chroot. However when using chroot no UI is available, only terminal. Good thing is that all changes you make there will be available for you on your phone.
Install chroot
apt-get install mic2
Insert your MicroSD card with MeeGo CE in it, and run chroot as a root, having the meego root folder as a parameter.
mic-chroot /media/XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Now you should have a MeeGo CE running in one of your terminals. The MeeGo CE filesystem is also accessible from your linux filesystem, under /media/xxxxxxxxx .
If the recommended way didn't help you, here is a list of alternative installation methods.
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| MMC Installation | Installs MeeGo to a external SD card. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X guides also. |
| eMMC Installation | Install MeeGo on the internal memory. This will destroy the existing fremantle installation. |
| Chroot install | Chroot install is a way to try out MeeGo by running it on top of Maemo 5 on your N900 device. |
| NFS-Root over usb networking | With NFS-root install you can run MeeGo natively on your N900, without erasing Maemo 5, without flashing or using SD card. Rootfs speed over USB is the downside. |
| Install U-boot from scratch | If you cannot install uboot from Maemo repo, then use this one to get it installed. |
If you encountered problems with your install, try one of the following.