[SimonGie]

The memory card in my phone is my 1gb one, aaargh.

Will have to wait till I get home to pop my 8gb in.

In the meantime I flashed my phone to 1.3 Global, reinstalled multiboot and set up the boot menu to boot Stock and power 40.

I have the meego kernel and raw image saved.

Im going to assume that its as straightforward as copying the meego kernel to the /boot/multiboot/meegoimagename then create and entry in /etc/multiboot.d/meego.item

Then dd if=/meegorawimage of=/dev/mmcblk1p1

That should be it. Reboot with the keyboard open, select Meego and TADA!

Famous last words.......lets wait and see.

[ceroberts75]

@simonegie

hahah i was expecting the famous last words to be....."trust me"

lmao

[SimonGie]

But you can......it goes without saying

*evil laugh*

[cpitchford]

dd of=/dev/mmcblk1p1 ?? interesting.. not just /dev/mmcblk1

hmm.. makes me nervous

[SimonGie]

Haha, Yes yes yes, it was a typo!

I have Meego installed and up and running by temp orarily loading the kernel, but I can't get multiboot to flash it yet.

It's dog slow on my class 4 card though....yikes.

[cpitchford]

yeah... s-l-oooh dear god

dicing up the emmc would give a bit of a speed bump.. but the problem is the image is like 500 meg.. compared to the measly 256meg OS flash on the N900 this is part of the show stopper...

it is really neat to see it dual boot.. but all SD card booting OSes are going to be sluggish.. it just isn't that fast

even class 10 is a bit crummy:

dd of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100 if=<DEVICE>

16gig class 4 SD card: 11.2 MBytes/s

eMMC: 18.21 MBytes/s

OS flash: 17Mbytes / s... however, the root OS flash is compressed.. and that is the raw speed.. so uncompressed it would be double..

That's for a 100 mbyte sample size

[SimonGie]

Its possible to umount and repartition the 30Gb storage....maybe an install to there?

[SimonGie]

Too much effort.....
Oh, wifi, calls and sms work though.

[cpitchford]

well..

You can change the partition table of a device under linux.. but linux won't "re-read" it unless all the partitions are unused...

so.. there are 3 normally.. swap (1gb) , /home (2gb) and /home/user/MyDocs (rest)

Now, it should be possible to shrink the size of the MyDocs partition.. but there are two problems with this..

Maemo, when connected in USB Mass storage mode, allows the PC connected via USB to access the EMMC directly.. it doesn't go via the Maemo kernel per se.. Essentially its like the EMMC is in a USB card reader that is connected to Maemo (for swap and /home) and to the pc (for MyDocs) at the same time.

If the MyDocs partition is shrunk, it is VITALLY important to make sure that the PC can only access the shrunken area, not the full original space.. This is more (much more) complex than simply editing the partition table on the emmc..

But, assuming you managed to do this correctly (which means editing a fair bit of stuff inside the Maemo OS) you might end up with a free partition you could install Meego onto..

This kind of relies on the fact that Meego sits on a single partition..

remember, the swap partition can be shared by Meego AND Maemo... the MyDocs partition can too (infact it can be shared between Maemo and Meego and PC provided both Maemo and Meego are aware of its new shrunken size)

The problem happens if Meego requires more than one partition and I think the SD installation does..

Since basic partitioning (DOS) has 4 partitions, you're kind of out of space unless you look at extended partitions... *THAT* is a pain in the ****

I swear i want another N900 so I can play with this stuff.. but it is my primary phone.. so as much as I know I could repair it.. and I know I could re-flash.. I can't be with out it for long

I also have about 26gig of media on my device emmc at the moment.. soooo... seriously I want a development device..

[ceroberts75]

i think i am just gonna wait on this one...i have had to send in 3 n900's in the last month in a half and am feeling a little to much like an underpaid tech support....kinda why i have disappeard for a couple days.

[Sever]

i was gonna buy another n900 a while ago but then i couldnt think of what i would need it for.

be careful with meego though, theres a disclaimer saying monitor your phone bill in case there are glitches in the calling system.

random question, anyone know if titan is working on a kernel compatible with meego? i would assume meego would be much faster if we could get it to boot at 1ghz instead of 600mhz.

[SimonGie]

At the moment, i think the bigges issue is the sd card slow access speed. i dont think an over clock will change much.

[Sever]

the slow sd card speed will be the bottleneck when booting up, but once the OS is loaded into the ram, an overclock should have a bit of an improvement in the performance as a whole. although the sd card will hold it back a bit when loading up some apps.

im curious about the browser. is there flash 10.1 implementation... lol

[SimonGie]

The browser is firefox, but I cant tell you what flash version because even after leaving it for 10 minutes after bootup, it was frustratingly slow and I just gave up and powered down.

[elie7]

i guess we have to wait for meego 1.2, it should run way better, so i'm gonna replace my 2gb sd card with a 4 gb one, and than go with nitdroid, anyone tried nitdroid after pr1.3 ????

just gonna get it for the apps.

[cpitchford]

---

Sever wrote:

the slow sd card speed will be the bottleneck when booting up, but once the OS is loaded into the ram, an overclock should have a bit of an improvement in the performance as a whole. although the sd card will hold it back a bit when loading up some apps.

im curious about the browser. is there flash 10.1 implementation... lol

---

When the OS is loaded into RAM? Are you mad!??! what RAM?! Remember the N900 has practically no ram..

Think of RAM like this... application ram, where running applications store their DATA (stack, heap) and disk cache..

Software runs directly from the disk.. uses NO ram.. however, to speed this up, it is first put into disk cache..

The more free ram (as in ram not used by application data), the more disk cache you have. So, when two applications are running, their data is held in RAM but if free memory is low, only one may have its software in the disk cache.. when the other application gets a turn to run, the first is pushed out and "dropped" and the other is "paged back in"

Now.. if ram gets REALLY low, the first application will put its application data in RAM out onto SWAP (this is what swap space is for)..

so.. On Maemo and Meego on the N900, we're going to be tight on ram.. stuff won't just stay there! The lower the ram, the higher the latency as it has to load pages back in from flash... and that latency gets larger and larger the slow the "disk" is... so SD card is much slower than emmc for example..

Meego is huge compared to Maemo!

I thought the flash10.1 implementation was licensed and only available to vendors who license it.. and since the N900 is running an open Meego implementation (as opposed to Harmattan / Nokia Meego) it mightn't be licensed??

[Sever]

i think of OS loading into ram as the total ram usage after bootup, not as in the whole OS. otherwise it would take 20gigs of ram for a pc to load up windows 7 64bit (33gigs for 32bit) lol. so yeah, my bad for my poor phrasing.

but does meego really use that much more ram than maemo? i just assumed that since it only has minimal functions at the moment that there wouldnt be that much ram usage.

[cpitchford]

First thing.. when the OS starts, daemons, services and apps start.. the software pages are loaded, the apps create data (application data) then go idle and the software pages are lost.. so there's a bump:

   :::

...:::::

1  2  3

1= booting

2= starting services/software

3= services idle so software pages (disk cache) lost

Now, on a system with LOADS of ram, the software pages are kept in cache so if a service needs to wake up again, the software is ready to go.. no delay... but on a 256meg N900, the ram is going to be cramped..

You're not wrong, but its a different way of thinking.. essentially software application data is kept in RAM, but the software, the bit that actually runs, the machine code, is kept in disk cache.. the N900 has NO ram compared to bigger phones..256 is cutting it fine.. Microb will use 100megs of application RAM easily!!

The Meego image is massive compared to Maemo.. and that's without the multitude of Nokia apps, like maps, ovi stuff so I would expect its footprint to be larger.. its probably not as optimised as it could be either, especially if more stuff has moved over to C++ (which creates MUCH larger overheads for things like v-tables and bits and pieces)... A Meego distribution that fits on the internal flash would have to be really cut down..

In all fairness, I expect the overall foot print to be very large.. lots of services running.. however, I imagine most will be swapped or pages out so it will be latency high.. but still usable..

[matthew_maude]

---

SimonGie wrote:

Dude, don't worry, I know what I'm doing. In fact, if YOU have any problems, let ME know

---

haha, i wasn't offering help

i just thought that if you had any problems with it, then i really shouldn't try doing it on a hangover sen as i'm a linux noob

i'm just not scared of messing my phone up

[matthew_maude]

is there a problem with the meego repo???
it were gonna take over 4 hours to dl the image and its only 520Mb (ish)

@cpitchford

i were gonna follow the instructions on the maemo wiki on re partitioning the emmc so i could put the meego image there but after reading your post, i don't know if i should.
does what you say apply to their instructions?