Finally success !

In case others have the same problem, I had to add sudo in front of the command line like this:

sudo ./flasher-2.0 -F SU-18_2006SE_2........

With ubuntu I guess root privileges are only loaned not owned... I'm used to very tiny linux distros where you are always root, this "sudo" is new to me... Oh well you learn something every day.

Still no idea why the windows Nokia wizard would not work... Obviously it is not hardware related. Nokia should think about being able to re-flash the 770 by just having the binary on the flash card, no PC, no USB involved!

-Bill-