Notices

Hi.

I saw the n900 for the first time today.
Some Nokia people demonstrated it, and I have to say it is very impressive. Since it litteraly only got 10 seconds of fiddling with the device I feel I need to post a couple of questions before I buy the device.

I fired up the terminal and tested if the ´man´ command was installed, and it wasn't. The next command I tried was ´bc´, but even the calculator didn't work.

I´m the kind of person who wants to use the terminal to its full extent.
eg. use pine for mail, my own sql phonebook, and mabye even a ATDT command to call people

Was it just the demo unit I used that had these critical programs removed, or is the Maemo os a linux distro butchered beyond usability for us true geeks?

cheers

/John

I'm not as geeky as you are. But I guess the answer is the latter. But I also guess for a geek like it is possible to get this all running on the N900 . I'm missing "man" too, but on the N900 you have internet and all man pages can be found there too .

On my linux desktop I have no pine ^^.

You can do pretty much anything You want to on this device...

I wouldn't say it's "butchered"... But most people wont be using pine, man, bc etc... Guess that's why they "stripped" the OS down a bit...

A lot of the software can be installed afterwards if You really want it... And if You can't find it, since Your a geek, why not compile and package it for the N900 Yourself?

(and yeah, why use space on man pages when You've got the internet in Your hand)

You'll want to wait and see if Mer has what you want.

Have a look here at the selection of software currently available (from the *standard* repositories) -> http://maemo.org/packages/

It's growing by the hour (if not minute)...

Man pages and documentation take a lot of valuable space (and are available online anyways). There's nothing inherent in maemo that would prevent you from compiling and installing terminal applications.

Get the N900 ASAP :P
I think you can give alot to this community

I know this is a specific answer to a general question, but bc seems to be available:

http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fremantle/free/b/bc/

Once you enable this repo, I imagine you can install it with apt-get bc (haven't tried this, but have installed other packages like tcpdump, strace, ... in a similar way).


You can see the other packages not listed in the "official" repos by browsing around

http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fremantle/free/

Or with apt-cache search <pkgname> once you have the device

You can use some of the packages from the debian stable armel repo. That's how I got sc working. Dependencies will fail on others - rsync for example.

Maybe because I (a ''normal'' phone user) have no idea what you're talking about they didn't include it?
.....Or they didn't have enough space on the 256MB chip.....