BootMenu

'''(There's an updated and simplified version of this page at http://maemo.org/community/wiki/HowTo_EASILY_Boot_From_MMC_card]'''

**This page is outdated. For bootmenu for newer N770 firmwares and for N800 see directly http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#initfs.''' Instruction below are only for N770 fw 1.2006.26.

The 770 can boot from internal flash or from an MMC (and from other sources).

In order to select where to boot from, you can install the "bootmenu" package from the Garage repository (see ApplicationRepositories). This package is based on Frantisek Dufka's bootmenu initfs, see http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#initfs.

Installing the bootmenu package will modify your initfs partition in the internal flash. The standard initfs partition is unfortunately so full that it can not be changed at all. Even removing a file to make space is not possible. To get around this, you need to flash a smaller initfs filesystem once, using the "flasher". Modified initfs images can unfortunately not be distributed for legal reasons. That means you need to make your own by following these instructions:

You need access to a computer that can run the "flasher-2.0", available here, and a copy of the official IT 2006 image, available here.

First extract the parts of the IT 2006 image using the flasher:

$ mkdir it2006-unpacked

$ cd it2006-unpacked

$ flasher-2.0 -F .../SU-18_2006SE_1.2006.26-8_PR_F5_MR0_ARM.bin -u

Then apply this delta to the initfs.jffs2 file to create the initfs-small.jffs2 file:

$ xdelta patch initfs-small.1.2006.26-8.delta

Then flash the resulting initfs-small.jffs2 file to your device:

$ flasher-2.0 --initfs initfs-small.jffs2 -f

After doing this, you can install the bootmenu package. If you already installed that package and the bootmenu-installer failed because you had the wrong initfs, you can just run the bootmenu-installer command again, as root in a terminal.