For the past 2-3 days, I've been hunting high and low inside maemo.org and outside other places to download apps and install onto this unit. I've encountered many good apps, quite a few useless apps (to me), and quite a lot of broken apps requiring libraries that no longer exists in the repository(-ies)/tres.

Now I've read Thoughtfix's many adventures from 2005-2007/present and he underwent a lot of reflashes when things go wrong.

I've also read up that the backup/restore that comes with the 770/n800 does not backup all the settings/logs/userbase information that is installed with non-nokia packages (i.e. pidgin, fbreader, xchat, etc).

So if that's the case, the person would have to reload all the distro's, packages, source.list's with the proper repositories.

So just in case one does not want to go through all the hassle of digging around for all the packages again, I wanted to know if making a self-managed repository possible.

Theoretically, I can create my own web server with the proper mirror matching the distro/package paths and just install away from there, right?

If this is possible, is there a how-to/walkthrough/guide to make such a thing for easy reinstallation after reflashing the units?

If this is possible (2), is there a way to script the reinstallation of the archive of working packages from the personal repository onto the 770/n800 without having to manually install each one; be it by command-line scripting or checkbox gui interface?

Hmm ... Great thought. The disadvantage of automatically reinstalling everything on restore is that it could come with whatever caused it to crash. In that case, a step-forward or roll-back system would have to be in place.

Perhaps you can make a shell script to enhance backups, but you have to be careful how it's all restored.