Right now I am just trying to characterize what went wrong in the first place. I did a number of things in a short period of time and would like to figure out what "broke" the GUI. I figure that the time to play around is now seeing as I have reflashed and lost any custom configuration anyway ....

Ah I think I ran into same problems as you, 5 days after having bought this nice n800.
I also updated a few stuffs, in particular magic:sys.. I've always like magic
So there must be something broken during the upgrade.
As I have no root access, will be even harder.
If you get an idea, let me know.

It's been said before, but I'll say it again - don't stay in Red Pill mode longer than you absolutely need, and go in with a purpose. (say, to install SSH) You don't need red pill mode for root, that is a common misunderstanding. When not in red pill mode, you can't see these extra "updateable packages" that in fact will reliably brick your unit. Unless you yourself installed it in red pill mode, don't update it in red pill mode. Maemo 3.x simply doesn't support it, and I've never heard of it going well.

It should now be possible to install Open SSH without red pill mode or root access - the Open SSH packages have been updated in the last few days so that they now appear in the Application Manager.

There should be three packages - openssh-client, openssh-server and openssh, with the latter being a dummy package with dependencies on both openssh-client and openssh-server so that both client and server are installed with by selecting a single package (simply a convenience if you want client and server).

It should only be necessary to install openssh-server in order to login to your device using ssh.

Ok thanks, won't take the pill again unless really needed.
I read somewhere that it's the same as "apt-get upgrade" but seems more than this.
I just reflashed. Before this I did:
cat /etc/apt/sources.list ( I am the only one to have problems to find repositories). Is there something like apt-get.org for maemo.
and then
dpkg --get-selections > packlist.txt
This is just so that I remember what was installed.

Becomeroot was installed as well as dropbear server and without red pill.
I've heard that only dropbear server allows X forwarding and it also looks lighter. So I use this one rather that official openssh-server.

Yep - I just came across your other post and was going to reply with a reference to this post. It seems you found me first I tried to duplicate the problem with combinations of Red Pill mode and R&D mode and didn't manage to do it. It did not seem to be magic::sys all by itself that borks things, it seems to be some combination of things installed while in Red Pill mode. As an earlier poster has very sagely advised, I am now only going into Red Pill for things I absolutely have to and then returning to Blue Pill ASAP.

Cheers,
Kris

Same for me, no more pills, I'm too old (or too yong) for pills anyway !
I am too new too this I only have my device since 1 week, so I still don't really understand what this hidden matrix feature does. I also really like the documentation "We still don't know exactly what this feature does"
Also another document (in .txt format that I can't find anymore) states that it's the same as doing apt-get upgrade. It think this is wrong. apt-get upgrade is the same as the gui part that says 'look for upgrades' or?
I did 10 upgrade today, even dist-upgrade (because some packages were kept), and it's still running.
As for the magic stuffs, I'll have to look what kind of magic is behind but until now, I don't touch it.

That brings my question: When do you really need to enable red pill mode?

I'll also rereread the R&D mode because I'm not sure I understood what it is. I do sudo gainroot, is this R&D mode?

There's a link debugging n800 that seems nice. I was lacking the log of the installed packages and the time of installation and status because I wanted to know exactly which packages didn't install properly before this noGUI problem. Without logs I couldn't see anything..

So may questions...
Maybe I'll hang around in the developpers mailing list or forum.