Chinook on mmc

I tried Sardine long time ago on my n800 and didn’t get it running. Now Maemo 4.0 Chinook alpha SDK is released and I decided to try again. I want to have a working n800 always with me, so I put the Chinook on the second partition of external mmc (first one is still a normal vfat for OGGs etc).

Mirroring the rootfs

I started by creating a new rootfs on mmc based on my current flash rootfs. I roughly followed the info in HowToBootRootFSFromMMC in Maemo wiki.

I installed wget, downloaded and extracted gnu tar and used it to create a copy to mmc.


apt-get install wget
wget http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo3.2/free/binary/tar_1.14-2.1osso_armel.deb
dpkg -x tar_1.14-2.1osso_armel.deb /root/tar
mkdir /mnt/dev-rootfs/
mount /dev/mmcblk1p2 dev-rootfs/
mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock4 /mnt/rootfs/
/root/tar/bin/tar cf - -C /mnt/rootfs/ . | /root/tar/bin/tar xvf - -C /mnt/dev-rootfs/


Upgrading to Chinook

Next thing was to upgrade the mmc rootfs to Sardine. This time I followed SardineGettingStarted in Maemo wiki.

I chrooted to new rootfs since upgrading a running rootfs would be next to impossible:

chroot /mnt/dev-rootfs/ /bin/sh
mount -t proc proc /proc
mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys/


First I upgraded my current stuff. I had some problems with fmradio package, so I just removed it:

apt-get remove fmradio
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade


I had to export osso-af-startup version 1.46-2 from svn, compile and install it manually because the version in Sardine repo had a dependency to non-existent osso-product-info package. It’s downloadable from here.

I added the Sardine repo to my sources.list:

#maemo:name Sardine
deb http://repository.maemo.org/sardine unstable main non-free


Then I upgraded to Sardine nicely with apt-get (dbus tried to install /var/run directory conflicting with ssh..):

apt-get update
apt-get install hildon-application-framework
apt-get upgrade
dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/archives/dbus_1.0.2-0osso10_armel.deb


The current Sardine repo seems still to have the same issue with maemo-launcher (see bug 952) that failed my first test with Sardine, but this time it’s already fixed in svn. So I exported maemo-launcher version 0.23-1 from svn, compiled and installed (downloadable from here). I installed the new missing dependencies with apt-get -f install.

Clean up and exit:

umount /proc/
umount /sys/
exit


Installing bootmenu

Bootmenu is a must to conveniently choose which rootfs to boot.

Installation is pretty straightforward:

cd /root
wget http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/initfs_flasher.tgz
tar zxf initfs_flasher.tgz
cd initfs_flasher
./initfs_flash


Before the flashing part, I created a bootmenu.conf to include my chinook rootfs and my third rootfs. The default bootmenu is normally sufficient.

Reboot.

Booting to Chinook

I had trouble getting the Chinook to boot up. I got the Nokia logo and then a reboot. I booted to my flash rootfs, chrooted to mmc and installed syslog. Then I rebooted to mmc and then back to flash rootfs and examined the /var/log/syslog on mmc. It revealed the maemo-launcher bug.

Lesson learned again: syslog is a must to have in n800 for debugging different issues.

Now I got the Chinook booting, without a theme though. After I said twice no to “Restore backup from mmc?” question and cancelled the phone wizard, I got an ugly desktop without theme. Selecting the Plankton theme fixed this issue.

Now I have working Chinook with my WLAN APs configured and my extra apps installed. Kilikali still plays my OGGs without problems :)