OK, I’ve begun to soup up my Nokia 770. So far I’ve sprung for a keyboard, 1GB mmc card and a travel WiFi router; and now Thoughtfix’s posts on GPS and Chainsaw76’s map work have me thinking about a GPS receiver. Not to mention wanting to upgrade to a Bluetooth phone.

I didn’t think I would want to stretch the 770 in so many ways.

To tell the truth, I started out reluctant to even flash a new firmware image. It wasn’t till the third image came out that I even did that. And when I first got my 770, I thought I should restrict myself to just the built-in apps so as to better understand what the typical user would experience. That was both a strategy and a tentative response to a new Linux computer.

Well, that decision lasted about three days. A vanilla 770 isn’t enough.

Actually, the first thing I did with my 770 was to change Home’s appearance — I looked at the four color schemes, wishing I could build my own (must be a way to do that), removed the News reader, web shortcut, and internet radio, and changed the background image to one of Jayne and Sam perched in the red maple in front of our house. Small things, completely superficial, and btw springing from the distinct need to feel I was the master of my Linux destiny.

So, three days in, I began to install and then later to uninstall apps. FBReader and Plucker Viewer came first (naturally, given my bent towards books — I’ve worked in publishing for my whole career). Then games, a lot of them. I’m not really a gamer [1]; but I play a couple and I sometimes need to engage one of my children so some games are for them. Installing was easy, and finally I had added more apps to the device than it had come with. The 770 was beginning to feel like my computer. Of course, I wanted more.

So then came Joe, the text editor, and vim. What, a text-to-speech engine? Flite went on. And Granule for flash cards. The GPE-PIM trio. Happiest day? When Tomas Frydrych casually let slip how to install fonts. I put in a dozen I can’t live without (Maiandra, Trebuchet MS, Gardiner’s hieroglyphs). Comfort food for the eyes: Look, I control how text looks on-screen! I tried things out, I removed what i wasn’t using.

It didn’t take much encouragment to venture under the hood. I installed XTerm (had to for the fonts) and did the command-line thing. Sure, it’s not so daunting, but I really really would like to give up the command line. I installed the cpu/mem/screenshot applet in a slight euphoria, because it meant I could take screen captures without becoming root and going through elaborate contortions that I didn’t understand (does that old method involve a web server? I still can’t figure it out). With a steely eye, I put in Midnight Commander to do simple file management things like move files to a directory hidden from File Manager.

So for the first few months, modifying my 770 meant finding apps that did neat things I wanted to do. I was pretty content and put some energy into e-book-building apps on the desktop. I thought I had everything under control.

Part 2: I learn the reality.

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[1] Confession time: All the blog items about games during the long period before release weren’t about the games — they were about the screen grabs! We needed pictures! What did things look like? We needed to see! And lots of games were being ported. Nice thing about it is that I started reading Marcelo Eduardo’s blog, A Handful of Nothing, which I really enjoy, and from there a number of other Brazilian blogs written by INdT developers, including etrunko’s (void *) and Renato Araujo’s Tux em Recife.