so ive been trying to get access to special symbols such as " ^><[ ]{ } " and everyone seems to be able to get a pop up screen with those symbols on it when they hit "FN + sym" but when I press those buttons, the screen that is supposed to pop up does not happen. Please help..... is there anything i can do to get it working? also, how do I turn on the secondary camera lens so i can take pictures facing myself?

THANK YOU!!

Whatever program provides the Fn+Sym popup seems to just crash from to time, and then Fn+Sym does nothing. I find it happens to me randomly when text messaging, every few weeks. Eventually it comes back, but it's quite variable how long it takes to decide to come back. A reboot should bring it back always. (If that doesn't work for you, you have a different reason for it not working than I do.)

To see how bad the secondary camera is, and why you probably don't want to use it, you can try the Mirror app (it's awful on mine, noisy, colour noise, banding, and can't see anything unless my face is directly lit). Also Skype may use it for video calls, but I haven't tried so can't confirm that.

(On the optimistic side about picture quality, BlessN900 and Fcam apps show that software & drivers make a surprisingly big difference to picture quality. They take noticably better photos with the main camera than the built in Camera app. So in principle the secondary camera might be improvable through software.)

Do you have scim installed? If so that will prevent "Fn + Sym" (and virtual keyboard) from working.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...562#post742562

I have investigated this a bit and found that the Fn+Sym is opened when the the Multi_key is pressed. But there are a number of keyboard mappings floating around that don't map this key. If you have this problem I guess that you are using a localized keyboard. You will have to modify this mapping to add back the mapping of the Multi_key. Be very careful when playing around with keyboard mappings and preferably install open-ssh server so that you can connect externally to your N900. Otherwise you may find yourself without any way of typing on and fixing bugs.

Personally I think it is a big mistake that maemo "grabbed" the Multi-Key for the popup. The Multi-key is traditionally used in X11 for the Xcompose mechanism. (See http://canonical.org/~kragen/setting-up-keyboard.html). The popup window is not as extendable. E.g. if I press "Multi_key - >" I get the forward arrow → . There is no easy way to input that under maemo.

Another problem with the popup window is that it only works with touch screen and thus you have to move you hands away for the keyboard.

There might also be a problem with using multi-key with external keyboards, but I'm not sure as I haven't tested it.

yes, I do have a chinese language input installed. I guess those symbols will not show up as long as it stays installed?
Also, do u know how to restart scim?

That's right. Although you can install a symbols table for scim that will allow you to enter common symbols.
No. You can always reboot if you're desperate.