ruedigergad

I just succeeded in dual booting my N9 with Nemo and Harmattan. This is pretty cool as I can switch dynamically between Nemo and Harmattan on my day-to-day phone now. 🙂

Please note that by doing the steps below you will for sure loose the warranty for your N9. Even worse, you may destroy (brick) your device, loose data etc. The instructions are only intended for “experts” who know what they do. So, you have been warned.

The procedure to do this is very much similar as described for installing Nemo on N9 via the “Persistent Single Boot by Flashing the Dual Boot” method in the Mer Wiki; i.e., the boot loader etc. are the very same and the process of installing is very much similar. It just needs a little of additional preparation.

At first I flashed the “open mode” kernel. I am not sure if this is actually needed but well. This way it was at least easier for me to get the Harmattan kernel zImage. I downloaded the open mode kernel from here, alternatively I uploaded the kernel binary here as well.

# Flash Open Mode Kernel
./flasher -a <fiasco_image> -k zImage-2.6.32.54-dfl61-20121301 -f

Note: please be aware that there can be several problems, e.g., with existing e-mail accounts. The best approach is to delete e-mail accounts after flashing and booting the open mode kernel and re-add those.

After the open mode kernel is installed we need the kernel command line. This is needed for enabling dual boot later on. You can get the kernel command line as follows:

# Get Kernel Command Line
[root@localhost ~]# dmesg | grep -i kernel
[    0.000000] Kernel command line:  init=/sbin/preinit root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 ...
[    0.225891] 0x0000003c0000-0x0000013c0000 : "kernel"
[root@localhost ~]#

Save the line starting with “Kernel command line:” somewhere. Please note that I only show an excerpt here as this line also contains data like the IMEI etc.

After the open kernel was flashed and it was assured that it works you can go on with installing the MOSLO and installing Nemo as described in the Nemo installation guide.

After Nemo was installed and booted you can enable dual boot. In order to do this create the directory “/boot-orig” in the Nemo root. In this directory copy the zImage of the open mode kernel and name it “zImage”, add a file named “cmdline”, and put the kernel command line you saved above in the file “cmdline”. Note that you only copy the actual kernel command line without the preceding text “…Kernel command line:”. After this was done you can reboot. This time you should see some textual message informing you how to dual boot. I hope you find this useful, happy hacking. 🙂

PS: I also added information about this to the Nemo installation guide in the Mer Wiki.