This is going to start out as one of those posts where I fill everyone in on all the details (that nobody cares about) of what I have done with my 770... Sorry!

What I've Done
I'm a pretty light user of my tablet, but I finally got around to installing 2008HE. I am just beginning to cut my teeth with Linux, so I know next to nothing, but I managed to follow the instructions to install Fanoush's high speed SDHC kernel which should hopefully also improve performance with my 2GB MMC. Next I killed metalayer-crawler (following instructions from post #7 here) because many have reported that this program is a huge resource hog and of little use in most cases. After pulling my hair out for a while I found out that it's really important to enter the "sudo gainroot" part (otherwise it you won't be allowed to rename the file). Yes, I'm that much of a noob.

My Thoughts
In my opinion 2008HE has a greatly improved UI over 2007HE and previous. Many people (including the developers) had cautioned about the performance, but I found that in many cases it performs faster than 2007HE had for me. The ability to use flash (even if it doesn't work too well in many cases) is a big plus. The ability to easily browse my network & NAS devices is what sealed the deal for me. I will (at least attempt to) use 2008HE as my primary 770 OS from now on.

On the downside, the stereo sound issue is slightly annoying, but of little concern to me, personally, because if I want good sound I will just use some headphones anyway. My biggest problem is simply that the Mozilla browser seems to crash at random on a regular basis. I don't know if this is a problem with the browser itself or the OS. Perhaps it is happening due to limited resources?

What Next?
I intend to try running 2008HE from my MMC becasue some have stated that this should improve performance. Can anyone tell me what kind of performace increases I should expect to see from this? Or is this performance highly card specific?

I probably need to allocate more swap memory (and maybe this will help the browser crashing issue). Can anyone tell me how to do this?

I noticed this archive:
hacker2008-patches.tar.gz 4326 patches for OS2008
in the location of the 2008HE download. When I extracted it I found several .patch files including some that had to do with the metalayer-crawler. Are these patches that can be applied to the current 2008HE to fix bugs, and if they are how does one install them? Are they something else perhaps covering changes to make OS2008 run on the 770 or patches that must be applied when the source for the OS is compiled? Sorry for my noob questions.

Are there any other steps that I can take to improve the performance of 2008HE and get the best possible end user experience? If so please tell. Will Seatbelt help or is this a totally obsolete program?

Final Thoughts
I know there is next to zero chance that any of the developers involved with the HE releases for the 770 will ever read this or even if they do that it will have any influence whatsoever on future releases, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway. I know it was said that "the Hacker Edition has reached its limit", but some users, like myself, prefer this release to other OS available for the 770. I hope that someone will take the time to update 2008HE with some of the bug fixes and performance enhancements that were part of Diablo. I understand that the wireless automatic updates will probably be of little use for an OS that you do not intend to support, but it would be nice to see this functionality included as well, perhaps for little things like updating the browser. Please take this request into consideration for the future.

Thanks,

Good to know that installation is so straightforward, I've been considering getting a 770 (in addition to my n810) for some small projects I want to do around the house.

edit: And welcome to ITT.

It is worth having on MMC also because you can dual or triple boot all OS200x versions. Opinions on performance widely differ. IMO the difference is significant and is much better. It is card specific in the sense that there are three speeds you can get, old rs-mmc cards (1 row of contacts) can give you 16MHz MMC bus speed ~= 1.8MB/s, newer mmcplus/mmcmobile (2 rows of contacts) are capable either of 24MHz or 48MHz giving you ~2.5MB or 5MB/s. Also apart from reading/writing being faster from MMC it is also almost free for the CPU. OTOH internal flash is compressed so any write or read is consuming lot of CPU for data (de)compression which is bad for the already underpowered and overtaxed CPU.

Yes, exactly. Those are changes needed to run OS2008 on older kernel and 770 hardware. Since they are against pretty ancient OS2008 version they are not very practical now. And yes they should be applied to the source so it useful for developers when rebuilding binaries not for average users.
Maybe. Seatbelt tunes some kernel parameters. One of them is /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. Increasing this can make your device feel slower but it can prevent some out of memory situations (=crashes).

I also think the 2008HE was not worthless exercise and it can be useful in many ways. It would be nice to have updated version based on latest OS2008. There were many speed related improvements that could make 2008HE run better.

It may be good idea to post your experience to maemo-users@maemo.org and ask about future of hacker edition. Maybe you'll get some answer. Here in the forum the chance is quite low.

My main problem is wifi doesn't work for me in OS2008HE. Other then that, It would be a keeper for me. Instead, I just stuck with the latest OS2007HE.

its been i while since ive really used my n770. mostly because it seems that browsing hasnt been a good experience since some website require using the latest browser. tonight i decided to break out the n770 running the last 2006 os and download the 2008 hackers edition. i must say that i am somewhat impressed with it.i had no problem using my wifi and also connecting to my bluetooth 3g lg cu500 phone. i was able to go to all the sites ive browsed before and the speed wasnt all that bad, it was at least as fast as the 2006 os. at least i think ill have another year using my n770.

i just want to thank the people who are working to keep the n770 a usuable product.

okay, i might of jumped to conclusions a little to fast. browsing is usable but i cant get any of my multimedia videos to work. might have to play with it more tho.

me too would like to use 770 some more time and would appreciate a new revision of HE2008. According to my experiences, speed was not an issue for me, but (sound and) instability led me to back to OS2006 an HE2007. In the mean time I'm eagerly waiting for Stskeeps's progress on Deblet port for 770. Now I allrady have a working LXDE GUI sitting on a an extra, modified SD card, for wifi modules and working applications. For me 770 is not dead and will not be for some time still.

Which of Fanoush's Kernels should be used for 2008HE on the 770?

I have installed the kernel twice on a 770 which has been freshly flashed, once using the instructions linked to in the first post on this thread, and also on Bun's thread on using the 48mhz kernel.

All that happens for me is that the 770 just then keeps rebooting over and over. Going to try with 2007He but I really want 2008 on.

Thanks

gaz

I'm using fanoush's 48MHz without problems. Your 770 probably reboots because of its life-guard.

any way to get display stay lit in 2008HE when charger plugged in ? In settings there is option for this but does not work for me