wahlau's online hut

today another firmware update was announced for the N800, and it will fix the sdhc problem some are facing. As usually, almost everybody complaint about the pain of reinstalling all applications, since the firmware update brings you a "fresh installed" Internet tablet. For those who are frustrated with reinstallation of many working applications, or those with boot from MMC/SD card systems, i think the firmware update will be a boring long procees, before one resume in the last state of a working tablet (mine is at least since my use/update in June/July). So it's time to look for alternatives.

Spending sometime in Internettablettalk.com is more than worth it - and having a nice responsive community will give us solutions quicker than you can imagine. After TA-t3 telling how to get the kernel image out from the update, then Fanoush came out with a kernel flash script and Milhouse providing the extracted kernel. And the steps to do the kernel update while maintaining all your applications and sanity - well described here (though the given kernel in the wiki was the previous one, not the latest for latest you should take the one from Milhouse). Nice, now i only need to go through the steps and get my kernel and initfs updated (hopefully without hiccups).

I choose to do everything with terminal, so i make use of wget instead of launching the browser. I already have x-term and becomeroot, so i can directly go for the software. a short note on what i did is as follow:

note: please be very sure that you know what you are doing. No one is responsible if you accidentally brick your n800 following the steps below.

/ $ cd
~ $ wget http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/kernel_flasher.tgz
[wget output snipped]
~ $ wget http://nmacleod.com/nokia/n800/zImage-4.2007.38-2
[wget output snipped]
~ $ tar zxvf kernel_flasher.tgz
kernel_flasher/
kernel_flasher/nandwrite
kernel_flasher/nand_rw_enable.ko.2.6.16.27-omap1
kernel_flasher/nand_rw_enable.ko.2.6.16-omap1
kernel_flasher/kernel_flash
kernel_flasher/flash_eraseall
~ $ ./kernel_flasher/kernel_flash zImage-4.2007.38-2 
Checking kernel image ...
Expected kernel size does not match real file size!! Incomplete download?
zImage-4.2007.38-2 size 1317632 padded 1317632 (0x00141b00)
Are you ready to flash? (yes/no) yes
Erasing 128 Kibyte @ 1e0000 -- 93 % complete.
Writing data to block 0
Writing data to block 20000
Writing data to block 40000
Writing data to block 60000
Writing data to block 80000
Writing data to block a0000
Writing data to block c0000
Writing data to block e0000
Writing data to block 100000
Writing data to block 120000
Writing data to block 140000
Kernel flashed, reboot to make it active.
Cleaning up... done.

~ $

Being brave, i just put yes even it complaint about kernel size not as expected (wish me luck). After the above, steps, time to reboot. before the kernel update i get this with uname:

 $ uname -a
Linux Nokia-N800-26 2.6.18-omap1 #2 Wed Jun 13 11:37:40 EEST 2007 armv6l unknown

and now after reboot, i get:

~ $ uname -a
Linux Nokia-N800-26 2.6.18-omap1 #2 Fri Sep 21 16:27:36 EEST 2007 armv6l unknown

note: don follow the wiki steps, since it was for the previous firmware update. If you have taken another kernel instead, you will get different uname result.

so there you go. with these steps, you should get the kernel update (if there are only kernel updates this time) without the fuss of reinstalling everything. It took less than 5 minutes to do this steps using ssh from my workstation. If you work on xterm the typing with stylus might take a little longer time :)