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
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How to stay safe
Staying in the safe side is rather easy. Install only signed software with software installer, and don't open the command line application (xterm).
X Term should only be opened if you know what you are/intend to do.
DO NOT EXPERIMENT IN XTERM! READ UP ON WHAT YOU ARE DOING IF YOU HAVE THE SLIGHTEST DOUBTS IN YOUR ABILITIES.
You can find more info about xterm in the article Terminal.
Take backups
Always keep valuable data in at least two places! This can't be emphasized enough!
The Don'ts -- what to avoid
Xterm:
- Gaining root access (see article Root access)
- Copy-pasting commands from internet to command line
- Installing untrusted .debs
Application manager:
- Enabling the extras-testing repository. (see Extras#Extras-testing)
- Enabling the extras-devel repository. (see Extras#Extras-devel)
- Installing non-optified applications. (This issue is temporary but still valid)
If something has already occurred
You should start with article Troubleshooting and see how the situation can be saved.
I want to do something anyway
Then you should see Installing unstable applications -article.
I think I messed things badly
Updating the tablet firmware is a good option. Pretty quick and clears all possible things that can be messed.