It’s taken me much longer to get this together than initially intended, so my apologies for that. Depending on your reasons for buying your n800 will make a difference to how much this document is relevant. What I wanted to do was concentrate on getting your n800 up and running, i.e. you’ve covered the basics, now lets install some applications to make this brick useful.

Before re-flashing my device, I always take a list of what is installed, here’s what’s on there at the moment…

becomeroot
camera,
canola
dates
devicescape
fmradio
hildon-theme-cacher
hildon-theme-plankton
maemo-serivice-handler
maemo-wordpy
maemokrypt
media center
microb-browser
openvpn
webmail notify
mplayer
navicore
openssh
oss-statusbar-cpu
pidgin
python2.5-runtime
simplelauncher
skype
videocenter

I won’t cover them all here, as we’d all fall asleep, so I’ll pick out some favourites…let’s get installing!

There are times where you cannot use WiFi, for example my workplace’s WLAN uses LEAP, which maemo doesn’t support. I found that setting up USB networking on my n800 was a bit of a pain since there isn’t a single document… if you check my del.icio.us feed you’ll see I bookmarked all I could find with a usbnet tag.

These are the steps I ran through to enable usb networking between my nokia n800 and my fedora 7 laptop.

After seeing this post on planet maemo, I wanted to replace my “applications” button with an n800 icon, but I couldn’t find one anywhere… I found a couple of icons in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon that where close to what I wanted (there’s a bluetooth icon, and input one) but they weren’t quite right, so this is what I managed to mash up.

(Image License)

Hope you like it!

Apologies to anyone who works on the bugs.maemo team, I was bored this AM and decided to ask for some features I want, as I felt guilty about using up someones time (who could be coding fixes for real problems), I also decided to check if some bugs reported by other people where also bugs on my n800…. ahh, back to work

I’ve had my n800 a couple of weeks now, and I’m still in the “lovin it!” phase; but one of the things I’ve quickly noticed is that being an n800 owner is quickly going to become an expensive affair.

I’m a novice PDA person, in fact this is the first one I’ve brought, previous companies have leant me smart-phone PDA’s so actually buying one was a big commitment to me… we all know that computer technology, especially gadgets have a limited lifespan.

I’ve had my n800 a little over two weeks, and the length of this post will propably explain why I haven’t posted about it before. I love the box, it looks sooo good, and the linux inside means that the scope of potential is just unimaginable… but… the experience isn’t perfect. I guess the experiece is very much like the windows / linux thing as a whole, what works is great, but sometimes getting linux “just so” can be more of an effort than in windows.