I had some time this weekend to do a little tinkering with my Nokia n800 Internet Tablet.  Where most people would maybe install a new application via the n800 software installer... I tinker and read, and find a way to install KDE 3.5.8 instead.

Ok, technically I cheated... I followed the easy instructions here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14680&highlight=kde

The steps outlined above basically install KDE so that it can be launched from within the n800 GUI.  I was pleasantly surprised when KDE booted up and... it looks almost exactly like the KDE I use on my home computer.... even the default KDE startup sound played at the appropriate time.

Why would anyone want to do this?  Well, the default GUI and apps for the n800 are really lacking in certain places.  With KDE, I get KMail, Konqueror, KOffice (which can open and edit ODF documents), and a whack of other KDE applications that fill up the gaps in the application lineup for the default n800/n810 environment.  There is a trade-off though... KDE is not (yet?) set up for touch screen interaction, so your limited to using only the stylus for navigation.  For me this is not a huge loss.  Finger navigation in the default interface is only useful to a point after which you are forced to use the stylus anyway.   Another issue is that the n800 does not have a hardware keyboard - you have to either use the on-screen keyboard, or an external Bluetooth (or USB keyboard).  This makes it quite hard to do some actions that are easy in a normal computing environment.. like Ctrl+click Alt+click (or even Right-click).

The next step is to try and take some screen shots.  Then I plan to flash a clean copy of the default interface (to clean up everything from all my messing around)  and I will try out the more difficult step of setting up the n800 to boot from the SD card.  This means I should be able to run KDE natively instead of on top of the existing GUI.  I'm hoping that this will make it slightly faster and free up a little more RAM for KDE.

It's little things like this that make Linux very cool.