Do you actually use those things from the Xterminal? I use them by ssh, the keyboard is too frustrating to type long things, especially when you need special characters.
BTW, how did you manage to install gcc? I spent hours yesterday on google, and still didn't find an easy, reliable way.

If you are following an online tutorial, you can often use copy and paste. Many people prefer ssh, true.

I've gotten so used to typing commands on my N900 for shell access that on my laptop I would sometimes take longer to type the right commands than I do on my N900.

Personally, I love the N900 keyboard (sure, extra keys would be nice, but I've remapped things so compactly that I'm happier as-is [all command-line-relevant characters are available with shift+fn+key presses, and I can do shift+fn very easily with the one left thumb]). If you go into it with the mindset of something that you can and will get good at with a little practice, and use it somewhat regularly, you'll get used to it within a month at the most.

So, to answer your question Radu: I do apt-get/dpkg stuff by command-line on the phone, I do just about all my archiving/compression/decompression/etc on X-Term. I run aircrack-ng exclusively on my phone, again in X-Term. If you check out my Monitor Clock clock-style in the Advanced Clock Plugin thread - I wrote that entire thing entirely on my N900, using vi in X-Term. After installing PHP and a webserver on the N900, all of my PHP/html/javascript coding has been done in vi-in-X-Term (I did SOME in TXPad for the syntax highlighting, but I'm more comfortable in vi at this point, so I enjoy working in that more than in TXPad). I have coded what little C I coded in vi on my N900 too - I did the same code prior in a Google doc, but I didn't copy-paste it into vi - I just manually typed it back into X-Term's vi. And yes I have compiled my C programs essentially entirely on the N900 - admittedly, the only program I've written aside from a "Hello World" was an attempt to copy qwerty12's R&D Mode Control into a CLI program instead of a GTK+ GUI one. So far I only got it taking parameters, I got stuck at the part where I needed to work the closed source cal library's functions into the program, and haven't had time to get it working since.)

GCC is installed on the N900 by enabling the SDK and Tools repositories (I'm pretty sure GCC is in the SDK one, but Tools is a useful repo to have enabled as well.) You have to manually optify it and its dependencies though. If you'd like I can share a script that I wrote to do the mv and ln -s commands - it's VERY simple to do but saves the hassle if you ever have to do it again or whatever.

Mentalist, I need a bit of help with this xterminal. complete novice. any chance you could PM me?

You can also run alpine, the one and only usable mail client.

It's somewhat strange and not always user-friendly, but it's the only mail client (on any platform) that properly supports IMAP and doesn't break when handling tens of thousands of messages.

Sadly, it's not packaged properly for the N900, you need to download a precompiled .tar.gz binary...

http://home.mminternet.com/delaroca/index.html/

You haven't enabled PMing you in your account settings. So no, I can't. My email address is openly visible on my account information though. You can always email me. I can always email you too, but honestly, if you have questions, ask. I mean, what would my PM/e-mail say? "Hey this is the guy you wanted to ask some questions of, what did you want to ask"? We can just skip that step and just have you send me a message/email asking what you wanted to ask (although I almost guarantee you Google-able shell tutorials will help you more than I can).

tkatchev: If it's easy to compile and make into a .deb without actually having to understand the detailed workings of make or whatever build scripts it uses, once I finally get my laptop keyboard back, I'll see if I can shoot it up into the repository.

if you are talking about cc++ then check my thread (i am noob and manage to get g++) here you go >>>

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=74021

good luck

New to Linux? Plenty of free books available for download.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=63052

Do it, i'l buy you a beer.

I'll buy you another. Installing alpine is one of the first things I wanted to do with my n900—I can't stand the built in mail client. (I'd also like to remove quite a few of these pre-installed programs that clutter up my menu, but that's another story).

Anecdotally, how difficult *is* it to build a package to work on the n900? I am by no means a programmer, hacker, or someone who can tie their own shoes, but there are quite a few packages I want on my n900 that aren't in the repos to the best of my knowledge, like cmus, newsbeuter, and links2.