Dear friends,

Thank you for all your replies. I have to say that I am quite astonshied, not to say appalled, by the lack of a viable firmware option upgrade technique built by Nokia N800 designers and developers.

I mean, they based their operating system on Debian which can upgrade *everything* with the simple command "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade". How did they manage to make the OS not downward compatible (OS2006 vs OS2007 or N770 vs N800), not upgradable without loosing all settings, not upgradable without downloading a flasher, with a not fully upgradable backup/restory utility (see Megabyte405's post above) and, to cap it all, it seems like some of the firmware released is buggy at best. How do you do that with *Debian*?!?!?! I just don't get it.

Frankly, it makes me wonder whether I should even bother will getting the latest firmware anyway. I flashed my unit once after purchase, and at least it works now. I went through a great deal of efforts to configure it to my taste and everything works great. I am simply not sure that it is worth trashing it all on a halfhazard firmware process anytime soon. And since updating the OS zaps everything anyway (its not updating - its *re-intalling*) I am probably going to way 12-18 months or more until some new version comes out which is truly waaaay better (and not reported as buggy) before re-installing the firmware.

The N800 is a technological marvel, a fantastic design and I absolutely love it (how did I ever live without it before?!). Maemo applications are great and there is a great deal of good third party applications out there, but Nokia truly botched two things:

1) the N800 is poorly documented (both the unit itself and the software)
2) the upgrade, scratch that, the *re-install* process is a disgrace.

Also, the fact that numerous repos have to be used is rather dangerous. What Nokia should have done is followed the Ubuntu approach to repos (main, restricted, universe, multi-universe) and keep it all in one place.

I can only conclude that the Nokia people behind the N800 are not really GNU/Linux folks, but probably relative newcomers, if highly skilled ones, to the free software world.

Please forgive my frustrated rant here, but having such a fantastic unit as the N800 have such fundamental design flaws is just appalling to the Debian GNU/Linux user that I am.

I suspect that there are quite a few Windows/Apple users who try the N800 and come out from this experience thinking that "free software is a pain in the butt to use and only for techies who like to tweak their computers for hours and hours and not for people who like it when it 'just works'" not realizing that it is precisely because Nokia did not use a Debian-like approach to design it OS that it is a pain to use and that the real thing (Debian) is an order of magnitude easier to use (not to mention Ubuntu which is the ultimate "just works" distro out there). I never tried upgrading (or even using) any iPaq, iPod, Plam or whatever other handheld device before, but I bet you that a Nokia internet tablet capable of being fully upgraded in one click (which, invisibly to the user, would execute "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade") would be a huge comparative advantage. Nokia missed a great opportunity here.

I really hope that Nokia comes up with a truly Debian-like OS one day. That would be bliss

What do you guys think? Am I off the mark here? Are you having the same frustration as I do?

Cheers!

VS