wahlau's online hut

While considering how i should play around with the Nokia Internet Tablet, James triggered off a discussion in the mailing list. And it brought me to an idea which i have thought of long ago - why not just boot from the memory cards and do all sorts of tests on it? And thanks to the helpful community, help came in right away. So it was time to get my hands dirty.

you might ask (as many did): "why should i boot from MMC/SD card instead of the flash memory?"

i have listed my reasons as follows:

1. i am learning to play/hack/test the unit. so i might damage it (logically) and hence need to reflash it. But i rather prefer not to touch the original system on flash. boot from external memory cards is a good option.
2. the unit is officially a University property :) so other people might also get their hands on it. Instead of reflashing it everytime on what we might need individually, a flash card will do us all good. chuck in your own card, and you have your system up! no worries of your
   private data being seen by others :P
3. instant backup and restore - i can now make nice tar snapshots easily by just mounting the root partition. yes, i can do that on the flash too, but restoring it would be a problem. Anytime i can just get another SD card (high speed ones are not really expensive too), and partition it then put the root fs on it. Wala! i have another system up in short time.
4. speed - i did read that speed can be faster as compared to flash. Well, it is not really something that will affect me, but still nice to have.
5. more space to install applications - virtually we can now have a 8GB root partition. compare that to the 256MB flash memory. hmm. :)

with this i will start a new series of topics under : "Fun with N800". The first is the collection of steps to allow booting from memory card.