After doing a bunch of different crap to my N800, mainly cloning the OS to the SD card, but also installing stuff from the command line (apt-get install) I rebooted to discover that sshing to the unit produced the error: "stdin: is not a tty." Puzzled, I rebooted again with the same results. I attempted to open up an xterm and the xterm window opened, but never dropped to a prompt. WTF?

Googling revealed that this can be caused by problems in your .bashrc file, but since the N800 uses ash, I hadn't created one. Again, WTF??

Rebooting to flash, I mounted my internal SD card (where OS2007 lives), and low and behold, something (not me) has created a .bashrc file in my root directory. There was not a .bashrc file in my /home/user directory.

Deleting the /root/.bashrc file restored the ability to ssh to my N800 and made xterm usable again. I post this just in case someone else encounters this problem.

Jeff

This happened again yesterday evening. This time no .bashrc file present on the N800. Rebooting made it go away, but no idea what the cause is.

I would blame it on apt-get, I have found that more times than not it installs the wrong version of the dependences, and screws everything up.