ROFL! Geez, guys, lighten UP, it's just a geek forum.

Next time I'm looking to get a spanking I'll go see Mistress Cruella, not to Maemo.org. She's LOTS more fun although she's not half as dramatic, even with all the leather and whips and stuff. Sheesh.

"Now, the world has bifurcated into the Steve Jobs "a computer should be as simple as a toaster" camp and the open source "real men compile their own kernels" camp. "

I hear ya. I was just ranting about Apple last night, how much I hate the fascist approach to computing ("you vill do it Schteve's vay, or not at all!"), but I'm talking out of the other side of my mouth on the morrow.

If forced to pick I'd always vote for full control over even my toaster's innards, but after a long night of configuration agony I'm sure ready to moan and weep a little at the injustice of it all.

Have you ever looked at this thing I'm fighting with? It's got a full multipage site JUST for the directions. I still don't even know what it's supposed to do, other than a promise of "PC Connectivity".

http://pc-connectivity.garage.maemo....ion/index.html

Hi gryvn,
I am N810 user and developer, if you want a lot of hints & tips, software suggestions, etc, please tell me so that I can send them by email to you.
Be a proud N8x0 user : Maemo 4 has some features and softwares totally unavailable to Android, iOS, Symbian, etc.

Nah. No need to lighten up as it has been a bright and sunny day for me already. The negativity and name calling came from your side. It might actually surprise you, but maemo is a pretty newbee-friendly place, compared to a lot of other linux forae. Especially the niche type of linux distributions tend to get a pretty esoteric and sometimes downright militaristic following. And you know what the result is there? You ask OP "questions" like this and your post simply gets ignored. 200 people will look at it, but no one will even bother telling you that they can't be arsed. After a while your posting will be deleted as if the question was never asked.

You, on the other hand, were actually given answers.

You got yourself a device meant for computer geeks but you expect an idiots treatment in the support for it.

Whoa; no, I hadn't looked at it. It looks like a grab-bag of pretty much every major communications tool I've seen on Maemo...

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure they are making things any easier by combining a dozen different tools, either. It looks more like they are just centralizing all of the setup and configuration tasks into one humongous configuration panel. And yeah, there's a lot of additional command-line stuff that they didn't fit into their panel...

Honestly, I'd just pick the individual packages that seem the most useful to you and install them separately. SSH is a wonderful tool for remotely logging in to other Unix machines (or, really, any machine running an SSH daemon). VNC is useful if you want to see (and use) your PC's desktop on your NIT. Samba can be amazingly useful in integrating your device into a Windows network. But yeah, installing all these things at once is probably overkill.

"But yeah, installing all these things at once is probably overkill."

Was for me. Unfortunately, that's the thing that comes up on most searches as "the" answer to networking on Maemo. Just my dumb luck to stumble into the worst nightmare one can possibly find, I guess.

What I STARTED out to do is be able to view my TABLET on my PC desktop rather than the other way 'round (e.g., see "Pocket Controller" for Pocket PC). I work at my desk a lot but would like to access stuff on the tablet so when I pick it up to go, it's ready since I've already been working back and forth on it.

Anything like that you know of?

Hmm. VNC is the classic app for this situation (so far as I know); I haven't been using it myself, but in theory, you just need to run the VNC server on your tablet and the VNC client on your PC...

Here's a thread that says there's a server available in the extras-devel repository:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=48113

I'm not sure how well it will work. It seems that VNC clients are better supported in Maemo than are VNC servers.

Actually, let me add one more note:

I do a lot of my work just typing at a command line, so all I really ever use is the "ssh" (secure shell) utility. (This isn't actually a shell itself, but rather a program that creates a connection to a remote shell.) If you can deal with using it, I suspect it's a lot easier to set up the server than with VLC. And SSH clients exist for practically every OS ever made.

Here's a link to the openssh package:

http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/openssh/

I've actually never ssh'ed into my N900 (only out from it), so let me try it...

Ok, got it working. I did need to create a password for the "user" account in order to log in (using the "passwd" command).

After that, it's just "ssh <ip address of your n900> -l user", enter the password, and you should be connected.

You can do an amazing amount of stuff with just an ssh connection.

"You can do an amazing amount of stuff with just an ssh connection."

You do a good sell. When confronted with an especially ill-designed and dysfunctional GUI I alwas know that theres a straighter path to the goal lurking in the command line, if I'd just put forth the effort to learn how to use it. My only excuse is that I'm usually just trying to get something accomplished and dont want to stop and learn the native tongue, so to speak. I dont work in the computer racket so they are tools and the occasional toy to me, and so I wont justify the effort, especially when I've got four other technologies to learn before lunch.

i oughta just take some time and gut through it. Obviously it will pay off in the long run.