I bought my n800 in early 2007. I have never tried to reflash my firmware to a more recent version, mainly because I was never aware that that is something that you do regularly. Somehow when you but the N800, there is no user guide that tells you about it.

Now I see that everyone is getting excited about the 2008 version of the firmware and I have decided to figure our how to do it. I'm a little nervous about the process because of warnings that it will turn my n800 into a brick. It would be great if experienced users could give some general advice on when to reflash and what to look out for. For example, the 2008 version is still beta. Should I wait until it's out of beta? What won't work when I am running 2008? Will my killer-app Maemo-Mapper die? Should I instead try to flash the latest version of 2007?

Finally, how do I find out what my current version of the firmware is? Is there a command for this? I think it's Bora, whatever that is.

-- rhackenb

The non-beta should be out 'soon', so you shouldn't bother to flash yet.

You can tell the version in Control Panel/About.

73 posts here and you weren't aware of different firmware versions - wow! I'm not sure people reflash "regularly" but it's something that most of us do at least twice a year. With the latest OS 2008 re-flashing will hopefully be a less frequent occurrence.

I thought the in-box (printed) or on-device (PDF) manual covered reflashing?

Duh! I guess that was obvious.
I have OS 2007 edition, version 2.2006.51-6. I guess that is out of date.

My other questions is about how to correlate the firmware version to a version name. What do Bora and the other names correlate with?

Thanks for the info.

--rhackenb

Look here for more info than you probably wanted
http://maemo.org/community/wiki/codenames/

I think of mistral as being for the 770
bora for the N800
chinook for N810

But the chinook OS is also for the N800

I took a look at the user guide pdf file and searched for 'firmware' and 'flash' and didn't come up with a hit. I did find under the heading of "Software Update" that you should check with www.nokia.com/n800 for software updates. It also tell how to get the version number.

I guess my misunderstanding is the use of the term 'software'. I took that to mean application software, not OS or firmware. After rereading what they have under the support section of the web page, I can now see that they are implying OS software, not application software. It would be nice if they were little more overt about that because in this forum, posts usually refer to OS or firmware.

Let's home my reflashing with 2008 will not turn my n800 into a brick. I'll wait until it's non-beta. BTW, I notice that Nokia expects you to use a Windows machine to update the n800. There is no mention of using a Linux box. They provide a .exe file for that purpose. Other instructions on this site seem to recomment using a linux box. I think I'll take the linux route.

thanks for the help.

Since you mentioned it, I think all this code name business is kinda confusing.

Imagine you're new to the tablets and you run into terms like maemo 2.0, 2.1, 2.2; mistral, scirocco, gregal; and 2006.26-8, 2006.39-14, 2006.49-2... and that's all just one year of releases! Just try to make sense of that without a glossary and a table!

The technology is on the move and they have to give it a name. To make it easy for people, a simple table would do. Nokia should be posting it because it's their baby. Nokia seems less tuned in than the experts on this and other forums. This website could host it in a wiki but there are similar sites out there and they will have to do it also if Nokia doesn't do it.

It would have been great if Nokia stated in their user guide that periodically the firmware gets updated because technological advances and that owner should check periodically to see if newer versions are available. They should also say what the upgrade is going to give you. I honestly don't know what successive versions of the 2007 versions give. Since I haven't upgraded to anything yet, I have no clue what to expect. Most of the new features are mentioned anecdotally in the various forums without a comprehensive description. Nokia seems very hands-off on this, depending on forums to do the work for them. The closest thing to a grand view comes from maemo.org and that's great. Does maemo.org belong to Nokia?