Ok i installed the Maemo 5 SDK on my Debian box everything worked perfectly which was a bit of a shock I decided I wanted the --color option in the ls command which for some reason seems to be missing in the default one. So i compiled coreutils 9.8 in FREMANTLE_ARMEL then copied the ls binary onto my n900 and justed used an alias to swap it out for the regular ls command. Seems to be working just fine I've got color output from the ls command.

This got me thinking of some of the other tools that are missing options like 'find'. If it's this simple to cross compile with the SDK why on earth did Nokia put limited tools on the device in the first place. And why this BusyBox shell? I swapped it out for (bash 4.2) why not just go bash in the first place? I love the n900 it's my first smart phone, it's the only one that ever grabbed my interest. I'm just wondering why I'm presented with a limited shell and tool set when its so easy to run a more complete system.

I'm new to Maemo so I can't help but think this is all a bit to easy, and something is about to go hideously wrong. Not that i'm adversed to reflashing, would not be the first time.

Nothing important, I guess I'm just wondering why Nokia used cut down versions of some of the core utilities, and this craptastic BusyBox shell.

Dave

One binary doing many things cuts down on size on the file system.

One binary doing many things has to be loaded one time to do everything. After that, it'll stay in buffers in memory.

One binary doing many things (typically) depends on fewer libraries that have to be loaded into memory.

My first guess is to save space.

Btw, you can install bash and findutils-gnu and symlink /usr/bin/gfind to /usr/bin/find. You need to do that for some package like gupdatedb to work properly.

Also, if you want ls to accept --color flag, install coreutils-gnu and symlink gls to ls, but it'd take you good-o 12MB of additional disk space.