Does anyone here know if this upgrade will delete all settings you've done in xterm? I've done quite a bit in filestructure changing/linking folders to root and other stuff. I don't want to upgrade if all of that will be lost and I would have to do it all over again. Anyone know how this upgrade works?

Of course it will erase everything, as any upgrade will, even a minor OS2005 one...
Anyway, if you flash now, you won't have to do it all over again -- you can't, because there isn't even an xterm available yet :-)

Why can't Nokia just allow us to actual "Upgrade" our firmware instead of Formatting it? lol

The one good thing this upgrade does is change the need for at least _some_ of those changes you made before.

With a real applications installer, programs will now install in the correct location so no painful changes to the path are needed.

A swap file is available out of the box (though mounting other partitions is problematic at the moment without xterm).

There are still some customizations you'll have to re-do, of course, but I think a few well-done packages could solve all these problems (the wolfram stuff could be installed via a package, couldn't it?)

In fact, most people may not even need root access.

Brad.

I bought my 770 yesterday, flashed it with the 2006 beta, liked it, learned it broke compatibility with non-Maemo ARM binaries like the privoxy binary I need to be able to surf, and it didn't have any bluetooth keyboard plugin available (yet) either. I promptly reflashed it to the latest 2005 and am now a happy camper running a machine with OpenSSH, Privoxy, Xterm and a bluetooth keyboard.

I see little reason to run off and upgrade until most if not all of the above are working on the 2006 release, myself.

The 2006 OS is a Beta and was intended for developers to use it to make compatible versions of their software for the 2006 OS. The sole purpose of it is so when the Final Version is released, you will have all the software already converted to work with the 2006 OS. That is also the reason why I will not upgrade until the Final Version is released. It is not intended for use as of yet, only for developers to code their software.

Right. I couldn't agree more.

It's a bit of a pain however if you can't use standard debian arm packages the way you can with OS 2005. Several of the packages I've installed come from there and are invaluable to me already.

Same here. I am very pleased to see that my little Howto in the Wiki has helped quite a few people discover and/or use Privoxy on their 770. It's a bit sad that with the new OS a simple end-user like myself will not be able to contribute in this way anymore. Now we will have to wait for real coders to recompile and repackage stuff that we could use on our own before...

Or we wait until more distributions (including, specifically, Debian) move to the armel architecture as well. When that happens, Debian's packages will once again be compatible.