Hello people in maemo land,

My story(I'll keep it short):
I had an n900, loved it, but thought it was a little over kill for what i wanted to do. Already have a (kind of) smart phone (Nokia 5800) which does basically everything phone wise I would want. Sooo, I decided I wanted to have another Maemo device to play around with and grabbed a 770 off ebay a week or two ago.
Well first obstacle I encountered was the WLAN connections never showing up(well usually never, probably once out of 20 searches). I did some researching and found out the whole Wireless N conflict thing, which basically makes my 770 useless for all the places I would use WiFi. Kinda crappy but not a huge deal I guess.
Second obstacle: the 770 started rebooting itself as soon as It got into the O/S. I flashed every O/S from 2005 to 2008HE numerous times with no success. Did a little investigating on that and found out how to set the device in R/D mode, and that it was (possibly?) something to do with Wifi bug corrupting memory or something. Stopped the constant reboots.
Third major, and so far most perplexing and annoying obstacle: Blue tooth tethering my 770 to my Nokia 5800 on AT&T. Why, oh why can't I seem to figure out why this isn't working correctly? I've managed to have it connect to my phone 3 or 4 tries out of roughly 50. I've tried a bunch of different settings, I tried using dial-up number *99#, then *99***1#, different access point names, user names, passwords, but only 3 times out of 50. I've tried it on every O/S from 2005 - 2008he. I got it to work briefly on the latest edition of 2007HE.
Is there a trick to this that I'm not getting? I googled and searched in the forums here, so If i happened to overlook something blatantly obvious please forgive me. I really don't want to put this thing back on ebay, because I love the idea of it. The speed doesn't bother me, the lack of updates doesn't bother me, but the not being able to connect online, AT ALL, does. I really only want to get online so I can get software installed to get the device running. I have no MMC cards so I'm going to be modding in an SD card soldered to the MMC connections. Of course, I can't get that up and running with out Fanoush's High speed sdhc kernel(which I have to download directly to the device from an online source!). Sorry for rambling on, but I'm running out of patience here! Any advice? Suggestions? Thanks in advance everybody!

Good move. You've got a real computer, unless someone has wrecked it beyond hope.

Conflict only happens during the process of connection, and there are various techniques in these forums (and in the related Bugzilla thread) for getting connected. Once connected you are OK. Maybe you find the physical techniques undignified or you are not adept at getting the knack. There is a software solution that is supposed to work with OS2007HE. Never needed it myself.

There is a kernel patch for this, available from Fanoush. It is built in to the last OS2006 and the HE OS's. Problems in those later OS's are not caused by that particular bug.

Tethering to phone has worked for me the first time and always. It sometimes fails with a Zoom 56k BT modem.

It's beginning to look as if your 770 was badly abused or worn out before you got it. That's an unfortunate possibility with any used gear. I've had some bad stuff too. I was lucky recently to buy a N800 that had been very well cared for. Sometimes it turns out one way, sometimes the other.

Why? 2GB MMC-mobile cards cost about $9 on eBay, including shipping from Hong Kong to anywhere in the world. If you are running out of patience, a fiddly solder job sounds like the worst thing you could do.

Why does it have to be downloaded directly to the device? It comes in a tarball. I have moved Fanoush's tarballs between PC, 770 and N800, copied them, moved them between media card and rootfs, and untarred them wherever they were needed. The kernel flash will fail if the untarred zImage is the wrong size, and then you just try again. Or you could avoid making things difficult for yourself (see above).

[EDIT: Fanoush's 48Mhz kernel improves performance spectacularly, although I don't know what it would do to a device that is already showing unusual instability.]

You can do it without a MMC by downloading first to your N900's data card. Using your 770 in USB host mode you can connect the 770 and the N900 to make the transfer. This will have to be done with OS2008HE, which has X-Terminal built in. You need XTerm to mount the N900 card on the 770, which does not automount USB storage.

[EDIT: If you no longer have your N900, you could download to a USB memory device via another computer, and then attach the USB memory device to the host-mode 770.]

(You say something about R&D mode, so it sounds as though you are using the Linux flasher. The flasher can be used to set the 770 into USB host mode. You will have to supply USB power through a Y-cable, available for a few dollars on eBay. The 770 has no internal power to the USB transceiver.)

Alternatively, If you get yourself a cheap MMC you can download first to another computer and then transfer the file by USB to the 770's MMC .