After seeing Grim’s Nokia N800 and reading about Alec’s (and also finding out that I need to pay no more income tax on my Nan’s estate) I decided to buy one for myself along with the bluetooth keyboard.
It arrived on Wednesday and I’ve been playing ever since.
A quick summary of the device can be made thus: It’s a pocket sized Linux computer without a keyboard and can communicate via WiFi or Bluetooth and has a display driven using an X server and uses an embeded version of Opera for a web browser.
Well, it works well, though there are limitations, as there would be with such a small device. Having said that, it was relatively painless to download and install all I needed to connect the machine to the work VPN service so that I could use the WiFi there and once I’d installed an xterm program and OpenSSH hacking the system, based upon Debian Linux, is a doddle.
There are two things so far I’ve not been able to do. The first and most important for me is get standard X wiindow fonts to work. The second is get an development environment set up so that I can build and install applications such as the full set of commandline utilities along with bash etc.
Oh, and did I say that you can display remote X programs over an ssh tunnel on the device.. sweet.