Yes I know bricked means it can never be saved so I will not use that word. Anyway here is what dumbass (me) did.

I was attempting to fix my prompt (get it back to how it used to look) after installing bash as my shell for the default user (user). well I changed back to /bin/sh, ran echo $PS1 wrote down that result and changed user back to /bin/bash. I then (yes without running it on the command line which is why I call myself a dumbass *****) opened up .bashrc and put export $PS1="the output of my previous echo $PS1 command".

duh apart from not having tested it from the command line first... there should be no $. well anyway the result is the reboot process brings me to the dots flashing across my screen forever.

so is there any "backdoor" to get in and fix my .bashrc? or am I looking at a complete reflash of the device?

Im guessing the latter..

not sure, but is probably just quicker to flash the kernel alone.

I recommend a windows xp 32bit to do such task


here is how to do it
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=849458&postcount=9

@windows [sic] 7
the kernel has nothing to do with this

No, sorry. You will need to reflash the whole thing, meaning you'll lose all your installed applications and modifications in your home directory. And no, it's not a kernel issue, it's a configuration file issue. Nothing you can do about it anymore.. :/

you could try booting from mmc if you havemthings set up and mount the maemo rootfs on meego or something

I know there's a rescue kernel somewhere... With which you can boot into that first minimal shell and see if you can fix things from there... I don't know if would help in this case, but it sounds like it should.

I'd go prod Mohammad about it - he's the one who I saw mentioning it somewhere.

Do you know whether the network device has initialised ? Perhaps you could try to ssh into the N900 ... (and then fix the faulty file).

thanks everyone, looks like a fresh reflash too bad I had heavily customized the thing. btw no network access, again thanks for the suggestions.