[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III Windows Mobile ROM De] poly_poly-man:
EDIT:

Yeah, I kinda doomed myself from the start with how I structured this post. I'll restructure it later to be more able to show you good information.

Old start:

Mer is a more community-led version of the Maemo phone and internet tablet operating system. See http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/ .

I was in contact with a member of that project (Stskeeps on freenode#mer), who gave me some information about porting this to phones such as the kaiser. He and I thought it would be a great way to benefit both communities (we get a good, not google-owned linux-based os for our phones, they get developers helping them make mer better). We also agreed that it would take a bit of effort.

First of all, Mer is completely designed for landscape-only, 800x480 phones at this point. It has been run well at 640x480, but that's still 4 times our native resolution, and 2 times what we can fake without crashes. The resolution problem is easily fixed by skilled theme-makers. The landscape/portrait problem should be fixed soon, given that the upcoming n900 will be a portrait/landscape phone. He said wait for the maemo conference for more on that.

The other problems we might hit basically are just the standard problems of molding the userspace around the kernel (get a phone app working, get the modem to work, etc.).

If you are serious about helping, please come to #mer and/or #htc-linux on freenode. At this point, the mer folks are probably more help to what we need to do.

INSTRUCTIONS:

At this point, quite literally nothing works, but it all almost works. Here's what I did to get that far:

1. Partition your sd card into two partitions, and make the second one ext2.

2. Unpack (with the -p option of tar) the rootfs (http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Releases/0.16testing , pick the q5 rootfs) to the ext2 partition. Make sure that it's not in any subfolders, but as the root of the drive.

3. Grab a zImage (or build your own) using the instructions we had in place from android. Put it on the fat side.

4. Set up HaRET on the fat side - Use a default.txt from android, get rid of the initrd, get rid of your ppp stuff (for now), and add "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait" to the kernel cmdline.

5. mknod /dev/fb0 c 29 0 (this was my number, check using the terminal in android, cat /proc/devices for the major, and /proc/fb for the minor). Also make sure that it's within the root, not on your disk :P .

That should boot, giving you a ton of messages about an "incorrect resolution png" or something - that's the splash screen unable to load. Simply rename /lib/init/splash-* (two files) to something else. Once you get a terminal later, there's an actual package to remove, but this lets it go a bit further.

You also need to keep X from starting at this point - all it does is hang. I have not yet done this myself, but it should be an initscript that you just un-link.

EDIT: It wasn't X that caused the issues. It was the combination of failed splashes and consolefont. Comment out the lines with "splash" in them in /etc/init.d/check{fs,root}.sh, and re-run.

I do not know if X actually fails - doing that test now.

EDIT: hitting framebuffer issues... no X yet.

So, if you're adventurous, and preferably a dev at this point (this is completely useless to users), please try this out and make it better!

Okay, just a note: the password is "rootme".