Fist Day with New Toy

I receivedt the N770 yesterday. I had to sign for it which meant that I had to go to the post office to pick it up. Actually, I guess I should not complain, I received an email from the City of Plymouth that someone is stealing UPS, FedEx and USPS packages from people's door steps.

I installed the battery, plugged in the power supply, installed the memory card, and booted it up. The first thing I did was set up my wireless. I could not get it to work, so did a little digging in control panel and discovered that for some reason, by default the N770 is looking for a five digit WEP key rather than the ten digit WEP key, so it truncated the last five digits of my WEP key. Once I figured that out and specified the 10 digit WEP, I was off surfing the internet.

When is the first thing a Linux geek does when he gets a new toy? See what software is available! As previously stated the only two things I absolutely need to do is enter work times into a word document and log calls in an excel spreadsheet. The first thing I tried to install was the Gnumeric spreadsheet. It is located at Maemo.org in the download section and all I should have to do to isntall it is just click the icon. It would not install, I got a message the I was missing libglade. I googled the package name and found a .deb that should have worked but it would not install. I read the forums and ran across an entry saying that the 770 application manager does not handle dependencies well so I would have to log in as root and do an apt-get update. I installed Xterm and found a "how to" for logging in as root. It was a little more work than I wanted to do at the time, so I decided to install other software. Amazingly, as I installed other programs, the installer added new repositories, and when I tried to install gnumeric again I was able to install it.

Gnumeric looks like it will work well for my purposes. I just need to log some customer data and the current time and date. I set up a short cut on my Palm to enter the current date and time, but I wasn't queit sure how to do that on the 770, all I knew was that I was not going to manually enter the time and date. I finally figured out that I could go to Insert> Special> Current Date and Time, and it worked perfectly. The spreadsheet that I use is located on the memory card so when I connect the USB cable to my computer I can print the information I need from the spreadsheet. I am hoping to set up bluetooth so I don't have to dig in my backpack for the USB cable.

Abiword was my next challenge. It is not one of the options in the program installer or on the Maemo website. I googled it and found many .debs for Nokia, but none of them will install. Today, I found a repository on abisouce.com for the maemo version of the program. I will have to give it a try later tonight. If all else fails I can probably use antiword to convert the document onto a RTF that hopefully Maemo pad will read.

Initial Likes:

• The design and weigth of the N770 make is seem like a quality device.
• Even though the screen is small, I can read everything on my google home page. I had read many positive comments about the display and they were correct.
• I had read comments complaining about the speed of the N770, but it was fine. Surfing the net was definitely acceptable, the only complaint I have is it takes a while to boot into Gnumeric. I think some people have to realize that it is not a dual core processor.
• There are many free programs on Maemo.com.
• Maemo Mapper, could it be, a free mapping program for a GPS?

Initial Complaints:

• I did not realize that the unit would have to boot every time you use it. I thought it would be like a Palm, where the OS would stay in ram. That said, the boot time is fairly short so I can live with it.
• I did not realize that gnumeric and Abiword were not preloaded, I wasted a whole evening trying to get them loaded and I still do not have Abiword loaded.
• There is no root to the OS, you have to log into R and D mode or, as I did install a program that allows you to get root access.
• This is a Linux thing, not just a Nokia 770, but a lot of the programs from the Maemo download section will not install.