Nemo/Installing

Installing Nemo

These instructions should guide you through installing Nemo Mobile on your desired device. The first thing you should do is visit our repository and download the latest image for your platform.

The First Boot

The first boot of Nemo on your N900/N950 is likely to be quite slow, so be patient for it to load completely, once loaded, reboot the phone and Nemo should be far more responsive.

Nokia N900

Installing Nemo Mobile on the N900 is relatively simple, in nearly all cases it is installed on the external MicroSD card, so that will be what this guide will be focusing on.

• What you will need:
  • A Nokia N900, updated to PR 1.3.
  • A MicroSD card with a capacity of at least 4GiB (more notes on this below)
  • U-Boot (installed on the phone[more on this below])
  • Either a Windows or Linux PC
  • And the image, for N900, the filename of the file you will want will look like:

 nemo-handset-armv7hl-n900-testing-X.XXXXXXXX.X.NEMO.XXXX-XX-XX.X-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2

• Nemo generally runs well off the MicroSD card, probably better than from the internal eMMC, depending on some of the following factors:
  • Speed/Class of the MicroSD card; a class 10 card should provide adequate performance, though note that the classes aren't a guarantee of performance.
  • Quality/brand of the card; some cards have issues with the N900 and offer slow performance due to I/O errors.

• U-boot is installed on the N900 through the Hildon Application Manager
  • Enable the extras-devel repository.
  • In the Hildon Application Manager, install the U-Boot package, found in "System" category. (The package is 'uboot-pr13' at the time of writing)
  • Verify the package has been installed correctly by rebooting your N900, at start-up there will be mention of U-Boot and possibly a penguin logo.
  • Once verified installed, disable the extras-devel repository to prevent applications being updated to development versions.

Linux

The process of installing the Nemo image to your MicroSD card is quite straight forward. Firstly, decompress the raw image file you have downloaded and put it somewhere easy to remember, if you do not have enough room to decompress the image, used the alternative last command. Insert the card into the card reader, your distribution will probably automatically mount it, so we must first find where it is mounted with:

 sudo mount

Note: Below /dev/sdX is used as an example and may vary, so use the mount point listed from the mount output Then, unmount it with:

 sudo umount /dev/sdX

Once you have confirmed which device it is, and unmounted it it is time to copy the image to the MicroSD card using dd:

 sudo dd bs=4096 if=file/directory_goes_here of=/dev/sdX

Note: "if=" is the input file and "of=" is the output file/location, since we are copying it to the MicroSD card, we put its location here, and since it contains a partition table, we don't specify which partition it is written to.

If you have insufficient space to decompress the image[or some other reason not to decompress it], use this command on the .bz2 file, rather than the .raw image file contained:

 bzcat directory/file_goes_here.bz2 | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sdX

DD will not show any output until the image has been completely written, so please be patient. Once it has been copied to the MicroSD card, you can remove it from your card reader and put it in your N900. Booting the N900 with the card present, the rear cover in place, the MicroSD card inserted and U-Boot correctly installed should result in Nemo Mobile booting.

Windows

The process of installing the Nemo image to your MicroSD card on windows is also quite straight forward.

• First, extract the .bz2 image, if you don't have any software to do so, you can use Bzip2 for Windows.
  • Download Bzip2 for Windows from here, choosing the first option, to download the setup without the sources.
  • Install Bzip2 for Windows
  • Open run by pressing 'Windows Key + R' and type cmd, press enter to open the command prompt.
  • Navigate to where bzip2.exe was installed and run the command 'bzip2.exe directory/file_goes_here.bz2 '
• The extracted image file will have the extension .raw, but the program we use to write the image doesn't associate with this extension, so right click the file and choose rename, and replace the .raw with .img
• Download the image writer from here, choosing the latest release of the binary [the first download link].
• Extract the contents of the .zip to a known directory.
• Run the .exe labled 'W32DiskImager.exe'
• Select the Nemo Image file
• Select the drive letter/mount point for the MicroSD card [please verify this is the correct device]
• Click 'Write' to begin writing the image to the MicroSD card.

Once it has been copied to the MicroSD card, you can remove it from your card reader and put it in your N900. Booting the N900 with the card present, the rear cover in place, the MicroSD card inserted and U-Boot correctly installed should result in Nemo Mobile booting.

Nokia N950

• For N950, the filename of the file you will want will look like:

 nemo-handset-armv7hl-n950-testing-X.XXXXXXXX.X.NEMO.XXXX-XX-XX.X.tar.bz2