Hi. I recently went to DefCon and I saw alot of people with the Nokia N800's.
It took me a while to find out what they where.

I've done a little bit of research now and I am interested in purchasing one. I have alot of experiance with the Zaurus sl-5500.

I guess my main question is will I have to do any re-flashing of the firmware like you have to do with the Zaurus, or will I be able to run nix* applications by using a package manager or by compiling them?

Thanks.

a little from column A and a little from column B

many apps are readily available from repositories for install without having to reflash the device to get them installed. for the most part there is no need to complile apps. you will find that the platform is not wintel, and you wont be able to simply compile some source with gcc and have it work on the n800.

as it stands right now, the OS is updated by reflashing the device, and that wipes out the data in the internal memory, not the external SD cards. you can copy the data off to the SD cards as a backup but that is rather a manual process. some who have used the built-in backup process had some post-reflash issues with restoring the data.

i have heard rumor that a stand-alone update packaging setup is under development, that will allow you to update the kernel and OS without having to reflash the device. as of yet this has materialized.

the processor in the n800 is an arm based 330 MHz processor, so many of the resource intensive apps available for linux PCs wont run unless they are optimized and maybe even stripped down a bit. then you would need to do any code porting necessary in the "scratchbox" environment (emulated on a PC virtual node), and finally compile it in the scratchbox environment.

those who are more in the know about the development process may correct a few of my points, but i think its pretty accurate. your best bet is to read posts here and search a lot. good luck