Hi there.

I don't yet own an N810 but hope to sometime in the future. I've seen screenshots of the Maemo UI (that screen has a *really* high resolution from what I can see in photos, since screenshots are SO big!) but don't really like its layout. I'd far prefer a UI that I write myself, but predominantly want a desktop based on something like Openbox or similar. If that's even possible.

You may have guessed already, but I've never owned an embedded device like this before, so I have a few questions: I know nothing about how to flash, update or otherwise copy firmware, custom or otherwise, onto a device like the N810. Well, I have a router/modem, but it runs proprietary firmware, and updating it was just a few clicks in a winfailure application.

So I just wanted to know:

* I assume the N810 somehow "boots" the firmware, so how do you flash this firmware onto the device? And if anyone can share how an ARM CPU boots, that'd be interesting to learn.
* If I flash corrupt or improperly "built" firmware onto an N810, is there a magic trick I can perform that I can use to tell tell the CPU to wait for a new flash image to be written to the device (like plugging in a special cable or flicking a switch inside the case), in order to fix it? Or is the device dead?
* Can you dual-boot two different types of firmware? Is something like this stable (dual-booting in a situation like this sounds a little on the unstable side, but I don't know)?

That said, I want to get uArch (Launchpad page, Google Code page), a subset of Arch Linux for resource constrained/non-x86 architectures such as the ARM CPU, working on an N810 when I finally get one. Arch Linux focuses on simplicity, and since uArch is more or less Arch Linux, if I installed it, I'd have a lot of options such as choice of windowmanager and the like. At the moment uArch takes up around 300MB for a base install but that size is being worked on.

Thing is, since I've never done something like this before, I've no idea where to start. So any help, tips, advice etc will be welcomed.

-dav7