Revision as of 04:47, 15 June 2011

Installing MeeGo to N900's internal eMMC

Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk. Doing this will break your Maemo 5 installation and most likely void your warranty.

Please also note the following things

• eMMC installation is not possible using a windows machine
• Installation is only been tested to work with Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 13. Any Linux box with bash should work though

Developer Edition Images

Raw images and corresponding kernel images can be found at http://repository.maemo.org/meego/n900-de/

Installing Developer Edition image to eMMC

Get Nokia N900 flasher binary (flasher-3.5) from http://tablets-dev.nokia.com and put it somewhere in your $PATH

The actual installation is done by a shell script and a custom version of N900 rescue initrd image. Get those from here The script uses flasher-3.5 to load the initrd and the kernel it uses. Flasher is also used to flash/load the kernel matching the MeeGo image.

wget http://timoph.fi/de-installer.tar.gz
tar xzvf de-installer.tar.gz
cd de-installer

Get the image and kernel that you want to install to your N900 and put them into the de-installer directory (same directory with the installer script). Take out memory card (see explanation below) from N900 and power down the device before starting the installation. The DE images are bz2 compressed but you don't have to extract it. You can give the bz2 file to the script.

Once the image files are in place and the device is powered down connect USB cable to it and start the installation by

sudo ./n900-de-emmc-installer.sh -i [MeeGo Image] -f -k [Kernel]

After the script starts flasher-3.5 power on the device and the rest of the installation should go through automatically. The installation takes 10 to 30 minutes depending on the used image.

Installer options

usage: ./n900-de-emmc-installer.sh options

This script  
1) install MeeGo image to N900's eMMC or to a memory card in it if found
2) Flashes kernel (optional)

OPTIONS:
   -h      Show this message
   -i      Image to install
   -f      Flash kernel (optional)
   -l      Load kernel (optional)
   -k      Kernel image - to be used with bz2 compressed and raw images (optional)
   -u      Specifiy an alternate usb interface. Default usb0 (optional)

External memory card

The installer is written so that it installs the given image to partition 0 which is the external memory card if there's one and eMMC if there isn't a memory card available.

Known problems

Network Manager

Network manager is known to cause problems during the installation. USB0 needs to be correctly defined during the installation and network manager very often decides to try get an IP for it from dhcp. It's recommended that you disable network manager when using the installer. The installer script will propose stopping network manager if it finds it running.

Different USB interface

For example in Fedora 14 the usb interface comes up as usb0-n900. You can solve the problem by specifying the used usb interface with the -u option. For example -u usb0-n900

Installer sources

The installer sources can be found from https://meego.gitorious.org/meego-quality-assurance/meego-ai under scripts directory

Planned improvements

• Rewriting the installer in python
• simple graphical user interface as an option to the command line interface
• Better way to distribute the installer (most likely by packaging it into Tools:Testing repository)

Reporting issues and feedback

Report bugs to https://bugs.meego.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=MeeGo%20Quality%20Assurance for QA tools component. For question and general discussion about the installer use meego-qa mailing list or #meego-qa or #meego-arm IRC channel in freenode.

We do take patches ;)

Reverting back to maemo

As a result of MeeGo being flashed onto the emmc, a reader of the Updating the Firmware page of the maemo wiki and in particular the section concerning flashing the emmc would come to the conclusion that the emmc must be flashed first, followed by the FIASCO/rootfs image. However this will not work. For some reason plugging the USB cable in the device results in the MeeGo OS loading up without a delay to allow the emmc to be flashed.

My solution was to flash the FIASCO/rootfs first, followed by the emmc, and then to reflash the FIASCO/rootfs again (in order to heed the warnings given in the wiki).

Make sure to leave off the -R the first time you flash the FIASCO/rootfs otherwise the device will reboot into maemo without you having flashed the emmc.

All the commands for this process are in the Updating the Firmware wiki.