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.

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.

I’ve been watching the progress of the “Nokia Internet Tablet” for a while now, it 1st caught my eye as it uses gnome rendering type stuff for the graphical front end, and the backend is some linux (debian?) embedded device, so the availability of an off the shelf linux PDA for a self confessed linux nut is a dream come true !

I’ve not brought on yet, firstly because my gadget fund is low (saving for a PS3.. probably) and mainly because there were no “off the shelf” GPS solutions, since most open source projects are US based, I didn’t want to mess about with trying to get something to work in the UK… importing maps, different blue-tooth issues, blah blah, you know the deal.

It’s been a while since I’ve been up close & personal with a nokia firewall , but recently I’ve needed to play.

The first thing I noticed was that the console cable has changed, now let’s not focus too much on the design floor where by you can’t actually get your fingers in properly to release the cable, but at least they got rid of the db9 type, serial thing that kept breaking.

The good news is, looking at the cable colours you can see that the cables are roll over cables - exactly the same as cisco use - great ! One less thing to carry around in the laptop bag

Nokia 6136 Phone

Smooth and seamless transitions between GSM and WLAN networks
…..

Available: Planned in the second quarter of 2006

All I can say is watch this space … <thinking aloud>What’ll be most interesting is how they achieve the voip/wlan link - cisco integration, skype, avaya? - gonna have to do some investigation me thinks ! </thinking aloud>