N800: sudo gainroot vs ssh root@localhost?
 

Is there any other way to put a Nokia N800 in R&D mode besides having to reflash the firmware?

Before seeing the forums, I tried su, got the error about restricted privileges. I tried "sudo su -" and "su gainroot" to get the message about R&D mode. Since I've already spent a fair amount of time building out my N800 to have what packages and apps I already want/need, I don't want to reflash if I don't need to.

Out of curiousity (and hoping that Nokia didn't lock down ssh root@localhost):
From what I can tell, it's full root access from within the secure shell. I should be able to install packages and make changes as if I were root in R&D mode, shouldn't I?

So long as I download the packages from the repository to my user home or temp directories and install from there while ssh'ed as root, is it indistinguishable from using the Application Manager in R&D mode?

Thanks in advance for your time and help. I've been lurking on InternetTabletTalk for a few days. I've had my N800 for little over a week. I truly love my N800... and having InternetTabletTalk & Maemo:Garage as resources! :D

Re: N800: sudo gainroot vs ssh root@localhost?
 

you do not have to have root access to install *most* packages. the app manager does have sudo permissions, and can do a better job of handling dependencies than the command line.

use the following link to add repositories to the app manager...

http://maemo.org/community/wiki/appl...nrepositories/

install becomeroot package and you can then "sudo gainroot" from the command line to gain root access.

Re: N800: sudo gainroot vs ssh root@localhost?
 

You can only get R&D mode by using the flasher, but it doesn't reflash the firmware so you won't lose any data by enabling R&D mode. The flasher tool simply sets a device attribute in flash memory. The flasher tool on Linux & Mac do a lot more than flash firmware, which is all the Windows flasher tool (Wizard) is limited to. This means you can only enable R&D mode from Linux/Mac (actually I'm not so sure about Mac, but I think you can). Use a Linux LiveCD if you don't have a Linux machine.

Alternatively, see step 2 which explains how to install the becomeroot package which makes R&D mode entirely unecessary.

As a final tip, see SSHing as default user, not root.

Re: N800: sudo gainroot vs ssh root@localhost?
 

Ahhh, cool, thanks! ...I was afraid the flasher for the N800 was like the firmware updaters for the Danger Hiptop or HTC devices. Seeing the flasher-3.0 for Linux, I didn't want to have to rebuild everything if I updated the firmware. Knowing that I'll have to sooner or later, I've created a /mmc/mmc1/packages folder for keeping everything I install to the N800.

Thanks for the help with ssh keygen for user and for pointing me to the becomeroot package. I grabbed becomeroot directly from:
http://eko.one.pl/maemo/dists/mistra....1-2_armel.deb
...installed it as a local file from App Manager, then went into XTerm and successfully "sudo gainroot"

Thanks for the help! I'm really impressed. The N770/N800 has a great user/developer community, much better than what I saw for the Danger Hiptop SDK. I'm looking forward to jumping into Scratchbox and learning to develop under Hildon soon.