Is anyone else having this problem.
Both Media Player, and Canola stopped working.
If I click in the file manager on the original "Nokia_N800" vid that came with the N800, it tries to launch Media Player, and then says "cannot play". It used to work.. Oddly, MPlayer seems to work just fine. I recently installed "UKMP" and streamTuner. Could something have overwritten some codec, or shared library?

Try restarting your system. unplug it from the charger, turn it off, boot again, test. Might just be that the codecs are messed up in the memory.

I tried rebooting, but that didn't solve the problem.
I think "osso-media-server" must have somehow got uninstalled.
I tried to do a "apt-get install osso-media-server", but that didn't work.
Next I tried "apt-cache search media", and didn't find it.

How can I install the osso-media-server ?? I can't find it in any of the repositories.

Might be best just to reflash your device - I uninstalled Media Player once by mistake and gave up trying to recover from the carnage that ensued.

I did re-flash, and that did solve the problem.

Of course I did a backup, and my /etc/apt/sources.list.
I also created a list of my installed packages by doing
dpkg --get-selections > packages.lst

Right after I got the N800, I bought (2) 4 gig cards on sale.
I use 1 for movies, and 1 for music.

The 128 MB that came with the N800 was kind of a throw-away, since it's so small. It was a bit of a pain to re-flash and re-install apps.

In case this happens again, I would like to have an easy way to recover,
rather than installing a bunch of apps again.

I'd like to gzip-tar my rootfs (/dev/mtdblock4) onto the 128 MB card that came with the N800 for safe keeping (Its 256 MB, but
with gzip it should fit -- mayby ??).

So if something happens again , how I backup my root file system ?

Should I consider dual boot. I hear that it's much faster booting from the MMC. It wont take much room on my 4 gig card... but I'm a little nervous about partitioning the card.... partition magic often screws up.

Will I need to partition the card with a ext3 partition (for boot) and another partion with FAT? so that I can still copy music to the card with my laptop?

I would like to tar/gzip my root fs onto the 128MB card, and put away, then keep the (2) 4 gig cards for normal use.

I'm not sure how to do this.

Would I need to do something like this ?

cat /dev/mtdblock4 | tar -zcf /media/mmc1/backup.tgz

or

tar -zcf / /media/mmc1/backup.tgz

any advice appreciated... thanks.

If I do a "df -h", it says I have 177MB on root. I want to tar/gzip that somewhere so, if something happens .. I don't have to re-install a ton of apps.

For about $100 bucks, I got a LinkSys NSLU-2 media server.
Around the size of a pack of cigs, it's also an ARM processeer media server.

I'm having trouble getting the disto to boot. Any experiences ???
I have a Hauppage USB TV tunner that I use with my laptop.

Appearantly, I can hook this into embedded Linux and watch TV anywhere.
I want to get this working, but it's a love/hate relationship.

I started playing with Linux in 1994. My experiene has been - 60-70%

256MB of rootfs probably won't fit onto 128MB SD/MMC - that's 256MB of physical storage, but as the filesystem used by rootfs is JFFS2 the data is already compressed so you could, in theory, wind up storing double that amount of data (depending on how well it compresses).

I suppose what you are trying to achieve (ie. backing up rootfs) might be feasible, but I find it an awful lot easier to keep an online page of the apps I install - specifically a list of the one-click install files. Last time I reflashed I had all my apps reinstalled within 20 minutes. A fully automated application rollback script would be better, ideally this would be a part of the Application Manager but one can only hope...

Booting off MMC is another option as this may be easier to maintain but I've always found that rootfs on MMC is too easily corrupted for it to be used for a "production" system. Also, each time you update an app you would need to backup your rootfs again... in my opinion it would all become far too tedious in the long run and the occasional reflash/reinstall isn't that much of a hardship if you can create yourself a web page of one-click install links.