I've just been reading the wiki entry about Red Pill mode, and it seems to me that some of the options would be of general use, including:

Clean apt cache - Blue Pill mode bins the apt cache by default, and Red Pill allows you to turn this bandwidth wasting behaviour off. Good, on a mobile, I'd have thought.

Use MMC to download packages - Avoids wasting rootfs space for temporary downloads of packages. Since rootfs space is at something of a premium, this seems like a no-brainer.

Some of the others seem (Show dependencies, Always check for updates) sound harmless, if not actually very useful.

Which are the scary device-bricking options?

You can install things from extras (and extras-testing and extras-devel) equally well in either mode, can't you? That seems to be more a matter of repository configuration than package manager mode.

ewan: The app manager does the right things automatically. Red Pill lets you turn these things off.

Is this something like the Book of Dead, Lost Ark, Ark of Truth, Holy Grail, etc. ? That kind of thing lol ?

The options do not display the full features of the mode. That being said, deleting .debs is a good behaviour, especially on a mobile device.

Everytime you install a package, it pulls a .deb, installs it (plus all the dependencies involved), if the app manager didn't delete those .debs, it would mean that every single package uses twice the amount of space it says on the box. How many people would be confused by this? A lot.

Maybe you know, off-hand, that you need to clean the apt cache in /var/whatever, but most users don't understand this, they don't even know what /var/ is. We've seen enough topics about the filled-up rootfs, let's not make the problem worse.

Why do we not want the install .debs to be put on the MMC? Because the MMC can be pulled out at any time (microSD or USB cable being plugged in). I don't know the implications of such a use-case, but I can't imagine it working out slickly and smoothly.

No, sadly, on the N900 it is more like taking off a panel marked, "No User-Servicable Parts Inside".

Hm. So, more like: "For authorized personnel only." ?

What is /var/?

@mmurfin87: It's a directory (think folder) below "/" which is the root (think top) of the filesystem on the N900. Basically, the file manager on the N900 shows you everything below "/home/user/MyDocs" which is fine, since that's where all the normally user editable files live. If you open up X Terminal and use the 'cd' and 'ls' commands you can look around the rest of the device...but there isn't much reason to do that unless you already know what you're looking for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesys...archy_Standard