N800 - ebook reader, internet, and music

Some time ago I saw a guy in the university who was reading a book on an ebook reader. I later looked it up: his reader cost about 500 euros, it only permitted reading documents, and anyways it was too bulky to carry around.

I wanted to extend my computing experience to the handheld and searched for better, cheaper, and smaller devices and I found one: the N800. It has a screen where you can read pdfs, it further has wireless and plays music and video. You can listen to lastfm, talk on skype, make photos, and chat. And it runs linux.

On the photo you see the N800 on top of the apple speaker system, playing music.


In Europe it is not that cheap, but if you order in the US...

At dell it cost me:
N800: $249.99
2 GB Secure Digital Memory Card: $24.99
IVA: $16.50
Discounts: $55 .

Shipping to Europe costs an import fee. Having friends in the US can save the fee. Add 75 eurocents for a power converter at the Chinese store around the corner ;).

This totals about 170 euros. Sweat.

Once you get it, you want to install it and see what it can do. A warning: be careful with the settings for email. It is not easy to change it, once you got it wrong initially!

In the administration tool, there are few software packages available by default, so you have to search on the internet for software (e.g. https://garage.maemo.org/), basically just clicking on install the N800 does the rest alone. However, the fastest way for adding software is using the administration tools. This guide explains a nice hack how to add many more software repositories at one go, so you have more software to choose from in the menu.

I installed many applications including xterm, openssh, evince, vim, vegalume, canola, mplayer.

The operating system didn't seem to recognize the flash memory on its own, so I had to set it up, doing some magic. Let's see how to do it:
You need to become root in order to do this. At the terminal:
> su gainroot
> passwd -d root
We set an empty root password, so we don't have to remember this gainroot thing ;) (the passwords are not really save anyways with the automatic word completion) and the next time we need to become root we can just type su.

Now edit the /etc/fstab file:
> vi /etc/fstab
We add a line at the end (going to the last line and pressing o).
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /media/mmc2 vfat rw,noauto,noexec,nodev,nosuid,utf8,uid=29999 0 0

Press escape, then save the file and leave by :wq. You can now mount the flash memory
> mount -a

On reboot the flash memory should be available.