I would greatly appreciate it if someone who uses tcpdump successfully on their N800 could provide a brief list of steps which must be taken to do this. I have tcpdump installed and I can run it, but no supported interfaces visible. I presume I have to have root access first?

yes you need the becomeroot package installed. also, make sure that libpcap is installed. it is a dependent package that may not be fulfilled. not sure if that is still the case.

as with most linux apps, try the app name, in this case tcpdump, with a -h or --help parameter. you will get the most commonly used parameters and the required ones too.

To install it, visit the Maemo 3 Bora,or Maemo 4 Chinook, SDK tools page, at http://maemo.org/development/tools/ and follow their download and install instructions. It will need libpcap but it will pull that in as a dependency.

For the manpage of tcpdump, try

http://www.tcpdump.org/tcpdump_man.html

To run it, you either switch to root mode... or you make the tcpdump binary "setuid root", ie., "chmod 4755 tcpdump." The binary is installed by default on /usr/sbin. If your WiFi interface is active when you launch tcpdump, it will start listening on the wlan0 interface automatically.

-- Denis

Ok, I'm off and running, capturing packets. Thanks for the helping hand!