Nokia N900 - postmarketOS

Hardware info on main page.

building pmOS on Debian, Fedora,

Links

postmarketOS, wiki, Nokia N900,

History

2021-10-17: pmOS v21.06 boots and works if I boot the N900 with keyboard open and select "external SD" from uboot menu. However, wifi doesn't work (tried both sudo nmtui and nmcli).

2017-08-02: N900 - wireless works after setting it up manually.

2017-08-02: N900 - the new image boots. First I have to connect via telnet to it to enter the password to decrypt the root partition:

[tingo@kg-elitebook ~]$ telnet 172.16.42.1
Trying 172.16.42.1...
Connected to 172.16.42.1.
Escape character is '^]'.

Enter passphrase for /dev/mapper/mmcblk0p2:
Your root partition has been decrypted successfully!
You can connect to your device using SSH in a few seconds:
ssh user@172.16.42.1
Connection closed by foreign host.

Next up is via ssh:

[tingo@kg-elitebook Desktop]$ ssh user@172.16.42.1
user@172.16.42.1's password:
Welcome to postmarketOS!

This distribution is based on Alpine Linux.
Read both our wikis to find a large amount of how-to guides and
general information about administrating and development.
See <https://postmarketos.org/wiki> and <https://wiki.alpinelinux.org>.

You may change this message by editing /etc/motd.

mkdir: can't create directory '/tmp/12345-runtime-dir': No space left on device
chmod: /tmp/12345-runtime-dir: No such file or directory

ok.

2017-08-02: elitebook - F25 - try to write the image to the sdcard, since it already contains a partition table and all.

[tingo@kg-elitebook 20170801]$ sudo dd if=./nokia-rx51.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M
208+1 records in
208+1 records out
875560960 bytes (876 MB, 835 MiB) copied, 58.6988 s, 14.9 MB/s

what does disktype think now?

[tingo@kg-elitebook 20170801]$ sudo disktype /dev/sdc

--- /dev/sdc
Block device, size 29.72 GiB (31914983424 bytes)
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 94 MiB (98566144 bytes, 192512 sectors from 2048, bootable)
  Type 0x83 (Linux)
  Ext2 file system
    Volume name "pmOS_boot"
    UUID 5E408E53-0667-4D7B-938A-A36ADD4DE3E8 (DCE, v4)
    Last mounted at "/run/media/tingo/pmOS_boot"
    Volume size 94 MiB (98566144 bytes, 96256 blocks of 1 KiB)
Partition 2: 740 MiB (775946240 bytes, 1515520 sectors from 194560)
  Type 0x83 (Linux)

and parted?

[tingo@kg-elitebook 20170801]$ sudo parted /dev/sdc print
Model: Generic- SD/MMC (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 31.9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  99.6MB  98.6MB  primary  ext2         boot
 2      99.6MB  876MB   776MB   primary

looks better. Will it boot?

2017-08-02: N900 boot test - I inserted the SDcard into the N900, and booted with keyboard open. As expected booting from the SDcard failed. Both "boot from external SD card" from the menu and 'run sdboot' from the console failed - couldn't load the ext2 file system.

2017-08-02: elitebook - F25 - now, copy the image to the second partition, and see what happens:

[tingo@kg-elitebook 20170801]$ sudo dd if=./nokia-rx51.img of=/dev/sdc2 bs=4M
208+1 records in
208+1 records out
875560960 bytes (876 MB, 835 MiB) copied, 66.5048 s, 13.2 MB/s

not sure if this will work correctly.

How does the whole thing look now?

[tingo@kg-elitebook 20170801]$ sudo disktype /dev/sdc*

--- /dev/sdc
Block device, size 29.72 GiB (31914983424 bytes)
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 128 MiB (134217728 bytes, 262144 sectors from 2048)
  Type 0x0B (Win95 FAT32)
  FAT32 file system (hints score 5 of 5)
    Volume size 126.0 MiB (132135936 bytes, 258078 clusters of 512 bytes)
Partition 2: 29.60 GiB (31779192832 bytes, 62068736 sectors from 264192)
  Type 0x83 (Linux)

--- /dev/sdc1
Block device, size 128 MiB (134217728 bytes)
FAT32 file system (hints score 5 of 5)
  Volume size 126.0 MiB (132135936 bytes, 258078 clusters of 512 bytes)

--- /dev/sdc2
Block device, size 29.60 GiB (31779192832 bytes)
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 94 MiB (98566144 bytes, 192512 sectors from 2048, bootable)
  Type 0x83 (Linux)
  Ext2 file system
    Volume name "pmOS_boot"
    UUID 5E408E53-0667-4D7B-938A-A36ADD4DE3E8 (DCE, v4)
    Last mounted at "/mnt/install/boot"
    Volume size 94 MiB (98566144 bytes, 96256 blocks of 1 KiB)
Partition 2: 740 MiB (775946240 bytes, 1515520 sectors from 194560)
  Type 0x83 (Linux)

this doesn't look correct.

2017-08-02: elitebook - F25 - files copied to the fat32 partition

[tingo@kg-elitebook 20170801]$ ll /run/media/tingo/EE77-4DBD
total 19016
drwxr-xr-x. 2 tingo tingo     512 Aug  2 10:41 ./
drwxr-x---+ 3 root  root       60 Aug  2 10:40 ../
-rw-r--r--. 1 tingo tingo 5831234 Aug  1 11:01 initramfs-postmarketos
-rw-r--r--. 1 tingo tingo 3940577 Aug  1 11:02 uImage-postmarketos
-rw-r--r--. 1 tingo tingo 5831298 Aug  1 11:02 uInitrd-postmarketos
-rw-r--r--. 1 tingo tingo 3866960 Aug  1 11:02 vmlinuz-postmarketos

ok.

2017-08-02: elitebook - F25 - create a SDcard layout for pmOS on the N900:

[tingo@kg-elitebook ~]$ sudo parted /dev/sdc print
Model: Generic- SD/MMC (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 31.9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  135MB   134MB   primary  fat32
 2      135MB   31.9GB  31.8GB  primary  ext4

ok. Create a FAT32 filesystem on partition one

tingo@kg-elitebook ~]$ sudo mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdc1
[sudo] password for tingo:
mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)

verify

[tingo@kg-elitebook ~]$ sudo disktype /dev/sdc1

--- /dev/sdc1
Block device, size 128 MiB (134217728 bytes)
FAT32 file system (hints score 5 of 5)
  Volume size 126.0 MiB (132135936 bytes, 258078 clusters of 512 bytes)

looks ok.