Update: MeeGo + N900 Dual-Boot Details

by Simon on October 17, 2010

With the recent excitement and hoopla over MeeGo on the N900 – I figured I’d post a quick update as to more details on the whole “dual booting MeeGo and Maemo 5” fiasco.

Although PR1.3 will have support for kexec, the MeeGo development team have taken to using uBoot for chainloading after NOLO initializes. Releases of kexec are geared directly towards vanilla x86 and generic patches are available for others, and in our case the RISC architecture. uBoot is a much safer way of providing means to unpack and load images than we currently have on the N900 – which consists of constant kernel partition flashing via a serious kludge package known as `multiboot`, but hey, it works and people are happy. So what does this actually mean?
It means very deep changes in the Maemo 5 kernel and sub-system to allow the N900 to dual boot with MeeGo. It means it’s not for those who get weak in the knees when staring at a black screen with a flashing cursor. It’s currently really only for developers, hackers and those who are curious beyond confidence.
It’s been said numerous times, but the N900 will have an unofficial path to MeeGo. This is not MeeGo-Harmattan or Maemo 6 and this is not what the N9 should be running. It’s the raw, un-molested MeeGo.com images. There will eventually be a user-friendly installation but for now, it’s filesystem extraction and kernel flashing direct from the proprietary Nokia flasher, and as always – there is a guide for that.