Is there any other way to put a Nokia N800 in R&D mode besides having to reflash the firmware?

Before seeing the forums, I tried su, got the error about restricted privileges. I tried "sudo su -" and "su gainroot" to get the message about R&D mode. Since I've already spent a fair amount of time building out my N800 to have what packages and apps I already want/need, I don't want to reflash if I don't need to.

Out of curiousity (and hoping that Nokia didn't lock down ssh root@localhost):
From what I can tell, it's full root access from within the secure shell. I should be able to install packages and make changes as if I were root in R&D mode, shouldn't I?

So long as I download the packages from the repository to my user home or temp directories and install from there while ssh'ed as root, is it indistinguishable from using the Application Manager in R&D mode?

Thanks in advance for your time and help. I've been lurking on InternetTabletTalk for a few days. I've had my N800 for little over a week. I truly love my N800... and having InternetTabletTalk & Maemo:Garage as resources!

you do not have to have root access to install *most* packages. the app manager does have sudo permissions, and can do a better job of handling dependencies than the command line.

use the following link to add repositories to the app manager...

http://maemo.org/community/wiki/appl...nrepositories/

install becomeroot package and you can then "sudo gainroot" from the command line to gain root access.

You can only get R&D mode by using the flasher, but it doesn't reflash the firmware so you won't lose any data by enabling R&D mode. The flasher tool simply sets a device attribute in flash memory. The flasher tool on Linux & Mac do a lot more than flash firmware, which is all the Windows flasher tool (Wizard) is limited to. This means you can only enable R&D mode from Linux/Mac (actually I'm not so sure about Mac, but I think you can). Use a Linux LiveCD if you don't have a Linux machine.

Alternatively, see step 2 which explains how to install the becomeroot package which makes R&D mode entirely unecessary.

As a final tip, see SSHing as default user, not root.

Ahhh, cool, thanks! ...I was afraid the flasher for the N800 was like the firmware updaters for the Danger Hiptop or HTC devices. Seeing the flasher-3.0 for Linux, I didn't want to have to rebuild everything if I updated the firmware. Knowing that I'll have to sooner or later, I've created a /mmc/mmc1/packages folder for keeping everything I install to the N800.

Thanks for the help with ssh keygen for user and for pointing me to the becomeroot package. I grabbed becomeroot directly from:
http://eko.one.pl/maemo/dists/mistra....1-2_armel.deb
...installed it as a local file from App Manager, then went into XTerm and successfully "sudo gainroot"

Thanks for the help! I'm really impressed. The N770/N800 has a great user/developer community, much better than what I saw for the Danger Hiptop SDK. I'm looking forward to jumping into Scratchbox and learning to develop under Hildon soon.