Hi,

I am looking for some advice on the best way to proceed from a situation I have cleverly (sarcasm) managed to get myself in. After messing around some, I have managed to get my N800 in a state where the GUI will no longer load. On a power up, the loading status bar along the bottom of the screen will progress to the right edge of the screen but then nothing further happens. I can SSH into the device so it is still alive. Looking at the dmesg output does not show anything obvious (to me) as to what the problem may be.

How I got here:

- enabled R&D mode
- enabled Red Pill mode
- set up ssh (thank goodness)
- upgraded a whole lot of applications/libraries that became available after enabling Red Pill.

I think I have two options here and I am not sure what the best one is so I would appreciate some advice from the community (although I am sure you are all smart enough not to get yourself into this sort of situation ;-).

Option 1 - reflash the latest OS. My concern here is that whatever is messing up the GUI may still be active on the device after the reflash and then because of the reflash I will have lost SSH access to the device and any possibility of doing anything else to address the issue.

Option 2 - using the SSH connection and apt try to selectively uninstall/downgrade things until the device may come alive again. My concern is that I do not know what is causing the problem so it is pretty much a shot in the dark as far as what to uninstall/downgrade/whatever in order to try and address the situation. Quite likely I will get myself in a situation of no return ....

Any advice that anyone could offer me would be appreciated. Right now I am leaning towards the reflash option as likely the one with the best probability of saving my nether regions ....

TIA ...