[jonathan_s]

Originally Posted by rvs

I haven't tried any of this, but I was planning on making a small change to the kernel in the future, so it's good to know the device can always be reflashed in case of a bad kernel.

Yes I found that very reassuring too.

I don't know anything about the bootloader except that it's a RedBoot loader and is stored in /dev/mtdblock0 and 2 (see /proc/mtd). I tried mounting these manually but didn't succeed.

I assume RedBoot is open source... so it might be possible to build and/or configure it to get a boot log on the screen during the boot? I'll try researching that possibility.

Concerning the syslog, perhaps you could try outputting to a file in /home/root? /dev/mtdblock7 is mounted there, though I don't know if it's mounted directly at boot. This won't be overwritten on a firmware update. But be aware that this partition is only 4MB big!

Edit: scrap that last remark. /home/root is not in fstab, so probably not mounted directly on boot. Or perhaps you could add it?

Ah... well spotted. I did try putting syslog onto /home/root but as might be expected, nothing happened. But I will try adding /home/root into fstab as you suggest.

EDIT: I tried your suggestion but nothing was output. Seems the kernel doesn't get far enough. I think we need either to figure out how to get a boot log on the screen, or do as some hackers did on the Iliad and fund a serial port.