[maemo-developers] General Maemo/Scratchbox/N800 help

[From: Tony Green]

On Sunday 26 Aug 2007, David Hazel wrote:
> Hi Tony,
>
> Thanks for your suggestion. I'll have a look at the instructions you
> pointed me at.
>
> One question, though: why do I need to fiddle about with public/private
> keys? I only want to be able to interact directly with my N800 via a USB
> link, so there's no one else likely to be peeping at the link while I'm
> doing it. I don't really care about encrypting files as they go across.

Hi David,
The public/private key-pairs are really for your own convenience. Once your 
public key's on the N800 you can connect to it without having to bother 
putting in passwords. Then it's literally as simple as 
"ssh -l user n800" (or whatever name you've given it in your /etc/hosts file)
to get a shell prompt. Or
scp /path/to/file user at n800:/path/to/new/file
which will copy the file straight across.

You can make life even easier by adding two lines to /etc/ssh/ssh_config on 
your desktop machine:
host n800
	user user
which will then mean ssh always connects using "user" so you don't need "-l 
user" or "user@"
>
> Also, isn't there a way of "logging in" directly to my machine across the
> USB link and simply typing shell commands (say, via telnet)? Does my N800
> have a particular host name when it is connected? I've played around with
> 'flasher' and found out how to put my N800 into "R&D mode" and "USB host
> mode", and flasher can obviously communicate with it. Having got it into
> host mode or R&D mode, is there no way for me to talk to it directly from a
> command line? (I'm fine with Unix/Linux shell commands; it's all the other
> faffing about that's defeating me at the moment.)

That's what I use ssh for. To be able to telnet to the N800, you'd need the 
telnet daemon running - I don't think that's installed by default (and may 
not even be available for it.) And to be honest, I think ssh is much simpler 
than telnet - maybe because I'm lazy where typing userids and passwords is 
concerned. :-)

I'm not sure what the default hostname of the n800 is, I changed mine as soon 
as I got it to fit in with the rest of my network naming convention, but as 
long as you know what IP address it gets assigned, you can call it anything 
you like in /etc/hosts.

You might find the xterm package (from the Maemo repository) useful for 
interacting with the command-line on the machine itself.

Hope that helps.
Cheers
Tony
-- 
Tony Green
Ipswich, Suffolk, England
http://www.beermad.org.uk
http://no2id-ip.web-brewer.co.uk