Geeky enough?
 

Hi.

I saw the n900 for the first time today.
Some Nokia people demonstrated it, and I have to say it is very impressive. Since it litteraly only got 10 seconds of fiddling with the device I feel I need to post a couple of questions before I buy the device.

I fired up the terminal and tested if the ´man´ command was installed, and it wasn't. The next command I tried was ´bc´, but even the calculator didn't work.

I´m the kind of person who wants to use the terminal to its full extent.
eg. use pine for mail, my own sql phonebook, and mabye even a ATDT command to call people :)

Was it just the demo unit I used that had these critical programs removed, or is the Maemo os a linux distro butchered beyond usability for us true geeks?

cheers

/John

Re: Geeky enough?
 

I'm not as geeky as you are. But I guess the answer is the latter. But I also guess for a geek like it is possible to get this all running on the N900 ;). I'm missing "man" too, but on the N900 you have internet and all man pages can be found there too ;).

On my linux desktop I have no pine ^^.

Re: Geeky enough?
 

You can do pretty much anything You want to on this device... ;)

I wouldn't say it's "butchered"... But most people wont be using pine, man, bc etc... ;) Guess that's why they "stripped" the OS down a bit...

A lot of the software can be installed afterwards if You really want it... And if You can't find it, since Your a geek, why not compile and package it for the N900 Yourself? :D

(and yeah, why use space on man pages when You've got the internet in Your hand) ;)

Re: Geeky enough?
 

You'll want to wait and see if Mer has what you want.

Re: Geeky enough?
 

Have a look here at the selection of software currently available (from the *standard* repositories) -> http://maemo.org/packages/

It's growing by the hour (if not minute)... :)

Re: Geeky enough?
 

Man pages and documentation take a lot of valuable space (and are available online anyways). There's nothing inherent in maemo that would prevent you from compiling and installing terminal applications.

Re: Geeky enough?
 

Get the N900 ASAP :P
I think you can give alot to this community :)

Re: Geeky enough?
 

I know this is a specific answer to a general question, but bc seems to be available:

http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fremantle/free/b/bc/

Once you enable this repo, I imagine you can install it with apt-get bc (haven't tried this, but have installed other packages like tcpdump, strace, ... in a similar way).


You can see the other packages not listed in the "official" repos by browsing around

http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fremantle/free/

Or with apt-cache search <pkgname> once you have the device :)

Re: Geeky enough?
 

You can use some of the packages from the debian stable armel repo. That's how I got sc working. Dependencies will fail on others - rsync for example.

Re: Geeky enough?
 

Maybe because I (a ''normal'' phone user) have no idea what you're talking about they didn't include it? :D
.....Or they didn't have enough space on the 256MB chip.....