How would I go about getting root access to my N900 when I plug it through USB to my PC running Ubuntu 12.04? I've been using Qt Mobile Hotspot but would like to do this without any application. Just plug in the N900 without it asking which mode to select (I know you can move hildon-status-menu-usb.desktop) and it should be usable straight from Nautilus. SSHFS would be preferable as I read it's better than SFTP. MyDocs is ext4+LUKS in the second partition of eMMC for which I have a script to mount MyDocs manually. I've symlinked phone data (messages, contacts etc.) there so it shouldn't get unmounted like in Mass Storage mode.

I've searched a lot but can't figure out how to get this to work. It seems as something simple to do. I installed SSHFS on both my PC and N900 and got some "read: connection reset by peer" error. Played around with the "ifup usb0" thing. I also have OpenSSH server installed on N900... Thanks for any help.

hmmm, I just use scp.
Okay, first of all why do you need mobile hotspot?

You know how to use sshfs - that's nice.
Just connect with n900 to your wifi network, as a client, get it's ip address by typing ifconfig wlan0 as root, and "mount" any directory from it via sshfs from your desktop.

However, as sshfs just emulates every action I would use nfs, and there is a thread which describes how:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=53164

I looked at NFS. It seems to be a good alternative, I don't need encryption. I want to use USB connection. I've been using Qt Mobile Hotspot because it enables USB networking, that way I can use Nautilus to access files on the N900.

My PC and N900 can't see each other. The network manager in Ubuntu just keeps trying to connect to my N900 without success. What would be the exact steps I need to do to get it to work? I have KP51r1 + CSSU-T on my N900.

I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one at TMO trying to get the N900 and Ubuntu 12.04 PC to see each other via USB. I think I got it to work once while I tried SSHFS and got the error I posted. That was before repartitioning the eMMC.

I must be doing something wrong, what did you guys do to solve the problem? I'm willing to reflash the N900 and reinstall Ubuntu if that helps.

Okay I have a solution in case anyone will have the same problem. As ridiculous as it sounds, it is to try with another Linux device. I think it's possible with the N900, but it's not much help since no one of you seems to know how to make it work. Thus I'm switching to the N9, that should do the job. I haven't contributed much on this community, but thanks for all the good stuff you've done.