I don't think it's reasonable to assume this. I ran my 770 in that mode without issues and unless I was pulling from the sardine repos I never had problems. Some people like to be able to install command line utilities that are invisible otherwise from the app manager. To have a version of scratchbox that's guaranteed to not only trash the device but it make it difficult to recover from even after re-flashing seems unwise. Thus far I've seen at least six different posts by people who have returned their n800s because of this issue. What a waste of money and time, for something that could be simply remedied by removing the package.

I hang out on maemo-devel and I must have missed the message that said don't upgrade scratchbox. Nonetheless, for j-random-user who wants to install a utility like 'unzip', there's very little chance they're going to know next time they go to accept packages for upgrade that scratchbox is going to destroy their tablet for all intents and purposes. Now Nokia is getting a reputation for crash-prone n800s is doesn't really deserve. Worse, people are confusing it with a hardware defect the 770s had. It doesn't help that they'll never see the problem until they reboot, making it seem like something else entirely is wrong since it occurs so early on in the boot process.

Larry