Precisely, same thing here. I've never needed to reflash the device and have since I got it in mid 2010 made so many changes, e.g. installed a plethora of packages (in some cases, as for gcc & co. , in a certain order), modified config files and set up (semi-)essential symlinks. If I'd ever decide to reflash (probably into Thumb) it would probably require at least a couple of days to get everything back, IF I can figure out all modifications somehow.

I think Pali and you got the wrong impression, I have no problem using command line, and the terminal is one of my primary environments when using the N900 (or any *nix for that matter). I am however very careful not to mess things up irreparably, due to reasons listed above, and was perhaps not 100 % comfortable with doing a whole system update with apt-get as I've only installed single packages using that method before.

Anyhow; I got the CSSU update installed by running apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. (Before that, I disabled all but the CSSU repo because I would get "key expired" warnings running apt-get update and some gstreamer packages "could not be authenticated" -- due to invalid gpg keys I assume -- when running apt-get dist-upgrade) It went right through without any errors but for some reason the terminal froze at a prompt for mount-ops, right after set-up of system-services. Luckily I piped the output via tee and reviewing the log I double-checked that it had set up every package, which it had. I hope this helps anyone else having the same issue (with libc6-dev) as I did.

Weirdly enough apt did not complain whatsoever about libc6-dev -- or any package for that matter -- as HAM did. Does HAM not use apt/apt-get to perform updates? If it does, any idea why it would complain when running apt-get manually didn't? Is it so broken?