First question, I was upgrading GPE contacts but it crashed while updating and bootmenu said not to do anything while it tried to repair the crash (the install logs I guess?). After that I booted in but I still can't install or remove GPE contacts. I even tried 'sudo dpkg -l (won't list anything) and sudo apt-get -f install (will only remove something that's not related).

Also is there a way to change the default username from user to something else?

Edit: This can't uninstall/install problem is a annoying. I can't uninstall or install anything else..any help is appreciated!

You could create a new user, and then set it to autologin with that account, etc, I suppose. I haven't tried, though, so I don't know the extent of things that would need to be tweaked. Mer and b-man's Ubuntu both allow you to specify your own username, though.

I'm thinking cause user seems to be the maemo default.

Edit: I just reloaded the image I cloned so that fixed it.

If anybody succesfully changed the default username, I'd like to hear about it and how it was done. Looks like an excellent opportunity to lock yourself out of your N900 :-)

The default username "user" gets hardcoded in many places. For instance, /etc/sudoers lists a pile of entries for "user", and you'd have to update those to prevent breakage. I also see various scripts which su to "user", or chown something to "user", or reference /home/user, or reference the UID of "user" (29999)...

In short, making this changeable would require replacing the hard-coded value in a pile of places. Not recommended.

That said, if you have some particular use case for wanting it different, some solution might exist to simplify that use case in another way. For instance, if you want to make it easier to SSH to your phone without having to write "ssh user@phone-hostname", you can add an entry to ~/.ssh/config to make ssh default to "user" for phone-hostname. And in reverse, you can edit ~/.ssh/config on the phone to make it use your standard username by default when sshing elsewhere.