Flashing Nokia N800 with Apple OSX
UPDATE: We followed (maemo instructions) which are given for older PPC based Macs, the OSX flasher worked perfectly well also with new Intel based MacBook. After all, it’s the version of the firmware that counts in the end, not the version of of the flasher itself.
Here we also explain how we succesfully managed to flash the N800 firmware by using the freely available beta version of VMware Fusion. The installation process of VMware on Intel based MacBook was a straightforward procedure. Then one can use his favorite Linux distribution as a VM guest operating system, we used the Ubuntu 7.04 distribution, which worked nicely (except for minor difficulties in mounting the USB but booting the guest OS with USB attached helped). The advantage on working with distribution which used .deb packages is that the same packet manager is used in N800 and one has to learn the tricks only for one packet management system.
The procedure of installing a Linux distribution causes perhaps a bit more overhead than necessary, but one also gets a nice introduction to virtualization for free. The beta version of WMware Fusion downloads for free without registering and the quality product was a pleasure to use. The virtualization approach helps to use also other Linux based development tools on Mac.