I guess you will need to wait for a public firmware release, and in practice this means the Maemo 5 final release. Sorry. fwiw we are willing to release it as much as you.

Your average newbie won't run apt-get from command line...

(Hmm, 1 beta tester device has temporarily deceased... )

The average newbie probably doesn't even know what a command line is.

There are no official firmware files available yet. I'd suggest you to ask for a Nokia developer on the maemo-developers mailing list. He may give you further instructions. Hint: hold your GPG key ready.

I know enough to know not to use one.

Some will, some won't.

You say the type of buyer is the type to snoop around? OK, well, if you prefer to assume that then i prefer to assume most of that type of people know the difference between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade so they'd know the danger of dist-upgrade after reading the apt-get manual.

Run apt-get upgrade instead. Or better, use the Application Manager GUI.

The phone is not completely 'open' as in: the hardware is not open source, and approx 80% of the software is open source.

'Open' has nothing to do with (in)ability to **** up the system.

Root password is also clearly explained on Maemo wiki, and works just like with previous Nokia/Maemo devices.

Before the next patient arrives: DONT ENABLE EXTRAS-DEVEL UNLESS YOU DONT CARE TO HOSE YOUR OS. Thank you for your understanding.

Is there some meta-package the user can install to pull in a fully-functional system? This would be very nice to have.

(For future reference, apt-get dist-upgrade is a very dangerous thing; apt-get upgrade is much, much safer. This is true on Ubuntu/Debian as well. I've made the mistake myself a number of times with various Ubuntu alphas/betas and had to wait for the packages to get fixed or download them manually).

Speaking of which, if you can recall the packages, you should be able to dpkg -i (dpkg install) them manually; they should be available in the pool directory in the respective repos, e.g. http://<mirror>/ubuntu/pool/main has Ubuntu's Main repository packages in it, in alphabetical directories.

Hold it: the gui updater runs "apt-get update", while I ran "apt-get dist-upgrade". Different story. Should have looked for plan B before cutting the tree branch I was sitting on, is all.

Haha, the command line can be a powerful tool once you learn how to use it correctly. But yeah, at first when you use it (I started from Window DOS) it's like woah.. and why on Earth would I use this. Now I'll split activities either way, depending on how fast I think it will take and depending on if I know or can remember the commands.

Extras-devel was explicitly disabled prior to the test and package cache was updated first.

Besides, I am not worried about that... I have hosed my fair share of routers and such and when that happens I simply swear a bit, reflash and go on with work and life, no biggie. The second time around I am usually way more careful :-)