User:Nin101/N900 Rescue OS

rescueOS is a rescue solution for the N900, distributed as a tarball and as an initrd image. It has several features, most notable:

  • Mounting maemo root filesystem
  • Mounting EMMC partitions (maemo home and MyDocs)
  • USB mass-storage mode
  • USB networking
  • WiFi Support
  • Battery charging

Contents

Installation & Booting

tarball

The installation of the tarball is rather easy and is in many ways compareable with the installation of meego-ce. The only difference is that a microsd card won't get completely overwritten as we only need one partition and do not overwrite the whole card and it's partition table. While it is recommended to create an ext4 partition, the kernel can actually handle ext2 and ext3.

We assume that you only need this if maemo is broken on your device, therefore we do not want to describe how to install it on the N900.

  1. Plug your microsd (through an adapter) into your computer.
  2. Find the device node of the first partition. For example, if it /dev/sdf1, run mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdf1. WARNING: All data on this partition will be deleted. It is possible to use a different partition. If you use the second, replace the "mmcblk0p1" in the kernel command line to mmclbk0p2.
  3. mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/
  4. tar xfvjp rescueOS-0.X.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/
  5. umount /mnt/


That's it! You can now proceed with "Booting"

Booting tarball

After you have unpacked the tarball, we can boot it. You need flasher-3.5.
flasher-3.5 -l -k 2.6.37 -b"root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait rw console=ttyO2,115200n8 console=tty0 mtdoops.mtddev=2" wait for "suitable device not found"...

Connect your N900 with USB to your computer. Once the kernel is send, unplug the USB. RescueOS is booting now.

initrd

flasher-3.5 -k 2.6.37 -n initrd.img -l -b"rootdelay root=/dev/ram0"

Connect your N900 with USB to your computer. Once the kernel is sent, unplug the USB. RescueOS should be booting now.


Releases

New versions are released from time to time.

Current version: 0.4 (2011-09-02)

e2fsprogs and dosfstools.

Download
tarball sig

initrd

Kernel Sig

Usage

To be written

You basically get a bash shell right after the bootup. However, some scripts in the directory /rescueOS/ want to simplify some tasks. Currently most of them are in an early stage, so if in doubt, do not rely on them.

Shutdown

  • unmount the maemo rootfs if you mounted it
  • detach it (ubidetach -m 5)
  • poweroff -f

WiFi support
It has wpa_supplicant, but without EAP support. This should be ok for most home networks which use a PSK.

Give the following a try:

wpa_passphrase [essid] [password] > /wlan.conf
sh /rescueOS/setup-wpa-wifi.sh

For DHCP, use udhcpc -i wlan0.

Charging
bash /rescueOS/charge21.bash