Herewith my hard-won knowledge on setting up a Nokia N810. You want to boot off the removable memory card – partly because it’s replaceable (when the flash memory wears out), and partly because it’s removeable (for backups, and when you need to reflash it).
- Learn how to reflash the tablet. I do this from my Linux box.
- Get root. My favorite way to do this is by installing OpenSSH, which sets the root password as part of its install process. Then you can open an X Terminal and ssh root@localhost.
- Prepare the removeable card. Mine is an 8GB SDHC micro card (with the mini adapter), formatted as 1GB for the bootable ext2 partition, and the rest as VFAT for N810 data. This is also a good time to practice with fsck on the two partitions, and to define your backup strategy (I use tar).
- Set up to boot from the removeable card. Download and follow instructions from fanoush’s site.
- Shutdown the tablet, and back up the removeable card.
- Put the card back in. boot up, and start installing and configuring software.
I use these apps daily:
- gpodder
- claws-mail
- mediabox
- maemo-mapper
- omweather on the desktop
- openssh
I also have iodine installed, but use it less often. I gave myself sudo access as well. Beware the published recipes for sudo access – believe it or not, the ones that were current 6 months not only didn’t worked, they soft-bricked the tablet so I would have to reflash, or at least reboot to the internal card (see why we did that?) and undo my changes.