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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!

Multi-Media, Music 'n' Video to you and me.

In my opinion every n800 should have Canola installed, it's a great multimedia app. Canola has had some dependency issues in the past, so I'd recommend you install it before anything else. To get this working disable all your repo's except the "Nokia Catalogue" and "Nokia Catalogue 3rd Party", then hit this canola one click install.

UK Media Player (UKMP) is another great application to install for multi media, it has a couple of dependencies. You'll need to switch on the extras repo, install mplayer (even if you don't want ukmp, I'd recommend installing mplayer as it's brilliant at playing back virtually any video file) and python either by using the application manager or the one click install files.

Utilities, those little extras you might need.

Here are some extras that'll enhance your n800 experience, you should already have the xterm install right? But some other things that might take your fancy would be the oss-statusbar-cpuit adds a nice little applet to the systray that show how "busy" your n800 is, and you can add some commands to it too!

Camera & FM radio, are two Nokia apps that enhance what you can do with the n800 hardware that aren't loaded by default, I'm not sure why... but to make it easier for you I've published a copy of my sources list, if your application manager has all these catalogues installed you should see the Camera and radio as options you can install.

Since writing my first document, OpenSSH has made its way into a repo, whether you use that or dropbear is up to you, I prefer openssh as it supports the keys that I use on the rest of my linux kit.

Plankton theme is probably one of the most popular themes added to an n800, to get it working you'll need both files plankton + hildon theme cacher... also as quick tip, always change your theme to a default Nokia one before running a backup and re-flashing your device... basically it'll stop the restore trying to use plankton before you've installed it.

Web, well it is a Nokia touch, I mean internet tablet after all.

I'd recommend you install the firefox derived web browser for maemo, it'll allow you to run "non opera supported" sites like google docs. You can switch between the opera and firefox rendering engine; to do that you need to enable the hidden menu by editing /home/user/.browser and set hidden=true (Reference).

If you have a gmail or google apps account you'll also want the Nokia mnotify, it'll add a little applet to you systray ... personally I'd prefer it to completely disappear if you haven't got any new mail.

If you're into instant messaging, then you'll need a copy of pideon. It's installed in components so if you're an msn or googletalk user make sure you install the correct protocol support, if all else fails install them all :)

For mobile blogging you may want maemo-wordpy, it's not yet something I've taken massive advantage of as I don't have a keyboard and you need a reasonable amount of patience or practice to write a post with the stylus, but this is something I intend to tackle!

Pim, you know contacts and calendar stuff.

There's no right answer to this, infact I've still yet to find something that suites me. As a user, I prefer Dates, Contacts and tasks by pimlico, they're built on the existing nokia "contacts" back end (evolution data server), but I've yet to find a way of sync'ing them with anything which makes bulk importing and general day to day usage an issue.

The alternative is the GPE suite (calendar, contacts and todo). Lots of people recommend GPE, originally I had dependency conflicts on my when I was running the 2nd version of ITOS, I'm yet to install it, but I plan to as there's been lots of complementary projects like erming for google calendar syncing and GPE summary - a desktop applet summary of your tasks and calendar

Ok, I think we'll finish there....
I think this post long enough, I'd like to also do a part 3 and look at the security apps you can install on your n800, this won't be so much of a n00b guide cause it won't appeal to most people but it's one of the reasons the n800 caught my eye originally.

 

 
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