General precautions
The point of this article is to give guidelines how to avoid tablet "reflashing" (see definition below). Yes, Maemo has command line access and everybody can gain superuser priviledges easily. With great power comes great responsibility. The base system can of course be installed again, aka "reflashed". If you are interested in reflashing and want to know more, please read article Updating the tablet firmware
How to stay safe
Staying in the safe side is rather easy. Install only signed software with software installer, and don't open command line application (xterm). The latter can be ignored if you know how to use command line.
The Don'ts -- what to avoid
Xterm:
- Gaining root address
- Copy-pasting commands from internet to command line
Application manager:
- Entering red pill mode
- Enabling extras-devel -repository in installer. (see Extras#Extras-devel)
If something has allready occured
You should start with article Howto Fix Maemo and see how the situation can be saved.