[maemo-users] How to clone an N800?

[From: Marius Gedminas]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 10:59:53AM -0400, Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:
> 	What is the best way to clone an N800? As I need to be able to
> roll out a bunch of them - 30 now, 20 in a couple months I'd love to get a
> "Golden Image" and copy it over very quickly to new tablets. That image
> would have everything - operating system, all the added apps, users,
> profiles, etc. The only differences between the tablets should be the name
> (where does it reside?) and the ssh and vpn keys.
> 	Any ideas how to do it painlessly? Can I just dd the internal
> memory to a flash card and dd it onto a new tablet?

I doubt that.

There's an old wiki page: https://wiki.maemo.org/Modifying_the_root_image

The mtdram will probably not work for you (new images need more than 64
megs), but the block2mtd should work.

I think the painful way would be to have a single modified root image
with the same ssh key, and then do the final modifications over ssh.

I don't know if the EULA of the N800 OS image allows you to redistribute
modified copies of it.  Talk to a lawyer.

An alternative might be to build a Debian package that depends on
everything you need and then does the necessary modifications in its
postinst.  Manually installing a single package on 30 devices shouldn't
be too hard...

Marius Gedminas
-- 
"When the grammar checker identifies an error,
it suggests a correction and can even makes
some changes for you."
                -- Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 User's Guide.
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