Greetings, all. I'm really considering a Nokia N800 this Christmas ($200 with a $30 bt keyboard is a good deal) as a supplement to/mini version of my laptop (currently running Ubuntu, I'm a Linux guy). I have 2 questions: first, I know this runs heavily modified Debian, but I also know that the terminal emulator isn't standard. To what degree will I be able to write scripts, use the UNIX filesystem, use UNIX utilities, execute scripts,etc. Will this be more like Ubuntu or OSX? Second question: Can any of the word processors ported to this device read/write MS Word docs. Or Excel files, or even powerpoint files? I can live without this functionality (it can certainly store these files, even if it can't open them), but it would be nice if provided by some third-party apps. Thanks, guys.

well, i dont know about all that, im pretty sure ubuntu, abi word can read some stuff, i think maybe word, but other things for sure, theres gnumeric for excel, but i'm again not sure if it will open your files... gotta do some tests.......

The Maemo OS is very much Linux, tthough I'm no expert and the N800 was my entry to Linux; I've since gravitated to Xubuntu and Puppy Linux on other machines and find all three diistros complementary in many ways. Others can address scriptability, but the number of apps ported to Maemo is miniscule compared with Ubuntu. As for Word, a program called doc Reader opened Word docs on the N800, but I don't think it's been adapted for Maemo OS2008 yet. I LOVE my N800, but I've been a little bit disappointed with the quantity & quality of developer passion for this platform. Word processing and PIM options are poor to nil (though setting up the N800 to run Palm apps could be one solution). I'm guessing (as a non-programmer) that it's not very easy to modify Linux software to run in Maemo or there'd be a lot more choices. Still, web, email, games, a command-line terminal, PDF reader, e-books, music, FM and Internet radio, movies and video, picture viewer, VOIP phone, Bluetooth keyboard capacity, 16 gigs of removable storage, all in your pocket and running open-source software -- that's cool.

More like Ubuntu. There are some standard utilities missing, but most of them can be installed. And what can't be readily installed can quite easily be ported, command line utilities don't need to be ported to the Hildon GUI and can often be used with no or limited changes - and the changes are almost always in the build system, not in the source code. I simply use apt-get source <package>, then move it to scratchbox (the development environment for the Nokia) and build a deb from there. Sometimes I'll edit the debian/ build files to limit what goes into the deb.

The standard shell is ash, which will limit some of your scripting, but bash is available and can be installed. Some of the standard utilities are busybox versions with limited capabilities, but again there are standard versions available. Perl is availlable too, and Python. And Ruby. When I log in to my N800 from my desktop computer it's like being logged into any other Linux box, I only rarely notice the odd limited-functioning or missing utility.

Tech42: Out of curiosity, what types of things would you try to do? There have been a bunch of times where I've honestly said that I don't think a tablet would be the right platform for people based on that their use cases are.

I will say this though... for $200, you've got Linux in your pocket and already being familiar with it, you should have no shortage of things to tinker and play with. Almost 2 yrs later my 770 is still sitting next to me on the desk here at work. Makes the commute a lot easier

It's definitely more like Ubuntu, but with a much smaller software. In fact, you can run some Debian (the distro Unbuntu's based off of) armel binaries on the IT, although I've only had that work from the console.

To add to what the others have said about word docs, I think Penguinbait ported KDE and a bunch of PIM and office tools to the N800, but you need to replace the built in OS to use them.

Tech42: I can't speak for Word, but the manual for Gnumeric (available at the link below) says it reads and writes to XLS format. Can I confirm this? Not yet, but it will be one of the first apps I download once Buy.Com gets off their butts and ships my N800 (ordered 4 days ago and still not shipped). Here's hoping it works.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

gnumeric under os2007 worked fine for me. Read excel files with no problems. The version for os2008 is in progress. I tried the recent version and found some bugs that are being look into. More info here.

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=11882

Just to clarify, Nothing is replaced, original OS will continue to function, but you can then select KDE from the extras menu and Launch KDE, when you are done, you can log out of KDE and you will got back to nokia OS.

I have all Koffice working on 2008OS, Kword, Kspread, Kblah blah, you get the idea.

And all this on the internal memory or from a boot SD ?