I did re-flash, and that did solve the problem.

Of course I did a backup, and my /etc/apt/sources.list.
I also created a list of my installed packages by doing
dpkg --get-selections > packages.lst

Right after I got the N800, I bought (2) 4 gig cards on sale.
I use 1 for movies, and 1 for music.

The 128 MB that came with the N800 was kind of a throw-away, since it's so small. It was a bit of a pain to re-flash and re-install apps.

In case this happens again, I would like to have an easy way to recover,
rather than installing a bunch of apps again.

I'd like to gzip-tar my rootfs (/dev/mtdblock4) onto the 128 MB card that came with the N800 for safe keeping (Its 256 MB, but
with gzip it should fit -- mayby ??).

So if something happens again , how I backup my root file system ?

Should I consider dual boot. I hear that it's much faster booting from the MMC. It wont take much room on my 4 gig card... but I'm a little nervous about partitioning the card.... partition magic often screws up.

Will I need to partition the card with a ext3 partition (for boot) and another partion with FAT? so that I can still copy music to the card with my laptop?

I would like to tar/gzip my root fs onto the 128MB card, and put away, then keep the (2) 4 gig cards for normal use.

I'm not sure how to do this.

Would I need to do something like this ?

cat /dev/mtdblock4 | tar -zcf /media/mmc1/backup.tgz

or

tar -zcf / /media/mmc1/backup.tgz

any advice appreciated... thanks.

If I do a "df -h", it says I have 177MB on root. I want to tar/gzip that somewhere so, if something happens .. I don't have to re-install a ton of apps.

For about $100 bucks, I got a LinkSys NSLU-2 media server.
Around the size of a pack of cigs, it's also an ARM processeer media server.

I'm having trouble getting the disto to boot. Any experiences ???
I have a Hauppage USB TV tunner that I use with my laptop.

Appearantly, I can hook this into embedded Linux and watch TV anywhere.
I want to get this working, but it's a love/hate relationship.

I started playing with Linux in 1994. My experiene has been - 60-70%