start-to-finish howto?

[ian douglas]

Hey all,

I'm fairly new to the Neo, let alone the development. I'm no stranger to 
embedded development, I've done it for years, and not afraid to jump in 
with code and helping out.

What I'm having a hard time with, and this is my main complaint with 
wiki's in general, is that documentation seems a little scattered. I 
started with the MokoMakefile and got the "openmoko-devel-image" built, 
many hours later, but have no instructions on what to do from there.

I have Gentoo and Ubuntu at my disposal, a USB cable to my Neo which 
works great via USB, and have yet to see a clear, concise article on the 
wiki of "now that you have it all compiled, here's how you copy the 
image/rootfs to the phone and actually install it on the phone" kind of 
article in a step-by-step format like the initial "this is how you get 
MokoMakefile working".

I see lots of documentation talking about uboot and nand erase and have 
no idea whether that's even applicable to my setup (GTA01BV4), or 
whether I need the debug board or not, or where to go from here.

I've also seen a request by someone else for a step-by-step guide to 
installing qtopia but never saw anything materialize from that either, 
though I've seen lots of follow-up from others posting screenshots -- 
just nobody posting a HOWTO for installation. Even the guys that make 
qtopia won't post a HOWTO article. I've downloaded the three .tgz files 
from their web site, but have no idea where to go from there. I've tried 
unpacking them to a 2GB microSD card and tried the uboot menu option of 
booting from SD but it didn't work because the .tgz files didn't include 
a /boot/uImage file or something.

I'd appreciate it if anyone can point me to some sort of step-by-step 
guide, or break it down into "follow the instructions from this wiki 
page, then this wiki page, then this wiki page". Sorry if I sound like a 
newb on this, I'm just getting pretty lost looking through article after 
article on the the wiki, since some of the instructions assume you have 
a debug board, which I do not.

I really want to contribute to this project, but I think I messed up my 
Neo earlier today by trying an "ipkg update ; ipkg upgrade" instruction 
because of the known gsmd bug that hangs the Neo on startup -- I don't 
get a user interface any more when I boot. Because of this, I want to 
take the new image I compiled, or someone else's pre-compiled kernel, 
find a fresh rootfs, and start over on my Neo 'cause I've obviously 
broken something and have no idea how to get back to square one.

Thanks,
Ian