I can empathize with the OP's frustration. With that said, however, have you ever asked a technical person (ie, admin / developer) write comprehensive and cohesive documentation aimed for the non-technical? hahah.

sorry. i can admit my short-comings. technical writing for the non-technical is one of them.

Thanks to this thread I discovered Schmots's site - excellent work there, looking forward to more.

It's got nothing whatsoever to do with Linux/Unix/OSX. n800/770 are model numbers of different physical devices, that's a Nokia ting. And exactly as any other vendor is doing it: Give the thing a number or a name or a letter or all of it. OS2005/OS2006/OS2007 is Nokia/Maemo's way of naming their OS versions, it's again got nothing to do with any 'x' system. It's like Windows 95,ME,98,2K,XP,XPSP1,XPSP2 etc. The operating system needs a name, the operating system may not run on all devices, etc. etc.

And about the mistral/gregale/bora code names, that's nothing special either. Palm, for example, operates in exactly the same way: Devices with slightly dfifferent names, that have to run slightly different OS versions, where the different OS versions have different code names. My T3 runs OS 5.2.1, aka 'garnet'. A TX typically runs OS 5.4.1 or something, aka 'frankengarnet'. And OS 6 was supposed to be named 'cobolt'. Or was it 'cobalt'. And then I haven't even mentioned OS 4.x.y or the devices that used it.
Oh, and Microsoft too used code names for those operatings systems I mentioned above (and Vista used to be called Longhorn).

The naming conventions etc. are simply things you have to learn, one way or another, with _any_ set of devices slightly more advanced than a matchbox. That you forget, after a while, the fact that you did learn such things, or even that you forgot that such issues exist with the devices you're already familiar with is no excuse. And as far as the N800/770 devices are concerned, there's really no need to work on the command line either, it's simply the case that it's _possible_ to do so, and thus someone will create some types of software where it's either useful or necessary to use the command line. It's not something you are in any way forced to do to operate the device out of the box.

First things first, Schmot's blog is a great resource, and incredibly well written...but I am a little bit concerned about how easy it will be to use in a year's time when he's written 35 equally good tutorials.

Blogs are inherently linear where as wikis are "logically" organised. Wouldn't it be better as wiki?

Second, TA-T3, I agree that every device has its own naming idiosyncrasies however for most consumer devices those names are irrelevant and unnecessary. No user of any Palm Pilot ever need know the code name of their product or OS. The same can not be said about IT users. Downloading anything requires that you understand all the code names.

However let's be honest getting to grips with the names is about the easiest thing anyone has to do to begin to customise their IT. It's bizzare, but at least that bit is very well documented!

I understand that you're frustrated, but you're making mountains out of mole-hills. I disagree about Palm users. There are tons of entirely incompatible pieces of Palm software out there that is specific to certain versions (and certain manufacturers) of the Palm OS. I also disagree with your statement that "downloading anything requires that you understand all the code names", this is quite untrue. In fact, there is very little that really requires you to know which version of Maemo you're using as most of the important stuff will work just fine on both.

The problem, I believe, isn't that there are variants of the OS that one has to know about in order to install software, it's that there are two parallel naming schemes, one from marketing (IT OS 2007) and another for engineers (bora, mistral, ...).

If Nokia, and its supporting sites, chose one of the two naming systems, particularly in the software installer, it would make things much simpler for all.

I would argue that one only needs to learn about the quirks of version names/number/compatibility and so on when you start installing the more demanding type of third-party software. For the rest, you would only need to add, say, three or four repositories, using the info for OS2007 on the maemo wiki (and if you _don't_ want anything extra you don't even need that. Actually, you'll get far just with repository.maeomo.org bora free) and from that moment on you would only need to find out how the application management tool works, which is not particularly complicated: Just walk the menues and there you go.

BTW, wasn't there a sticky posting about how to get started on the N800? If not, there should be one.. with just the minimal setup for the application/software manager, leaving out everything that could lead to trouble (like tons of repos, particularly mixing in non-bora repos).

Wow. First I wanted to say thank you. One of my secrets for understandable instructions is I get my wife to read it and see if she understands. The blog was far quicker to setup and run with, and I wanted to keep it from convoluting an existing piece of work. Maybe when I have 35 tutorials I will re work them into an ebook or something.

Thanks for the effort Schmots. I think a "how to get the most out of your N800" for non-techies would be a great help. email me if you need a non-programmer to help read/edit or if you decide to put up a site.

Hi schmots, nice tutorials, as for the dual booting one I am starting to feel a bit sorry about the mount options idea :-) The '-o rw,rpsize=1024,rpuid=0,rpuid=30000' mount options are not needed so if someone is really typing this by hand, please better remove them. These are options used by Nokia when the system boots (see /proc/mounts) and there is reason for them (when the device becomes full) but in the cloning operation they in fact do not matter so they can be omitted to save some typing. I would add it to the blog as comment but anonymous posting is not allowed.