For those of you who are familiar with the "Red Pill / Blue Pill" mode on Nokia N900 there is no explaining to do. For the rest of you who have no idea what I am talking about, this was a hack that allowed you to activate the Red Pill Mode of your Application Manager so that you can download and install DEB packages on your Nokia N900 right from the App Manager and also unlocked some repositories. Also it added two new buttons "Settings" and "Install from file". Well, I never though that the whole Red / Blue Pill drama was needed cos if you are skilled enough to safely use it, you will not need it in the first place, but hey maybe it is something that got many users excited and many devices being reflashed.

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Here is a screenshot of the "Big Matrix like question" and a big regret for taking the Red Pill for many:

Red Pill is an Application manager mode that disables certain safety features, and allows access to certain additional settings. It changes the way Application manager behaves, primarily by removing many of the safety locks that prevent users from installing harmful packages, or upgrading or replacing important system packages (which can result in reboot loops). It also hides packages that aren't relevant to users, and shows additional settings to tweak specific behaviors (like whether to cache packages to the internal memory card during installation).

WARNING: Red Pill is not intended for use by users, power-users, nor the vast majority of developers. Red Pill mode is very likely to break your tablet and should not be used unless you know exactly what you are doing.  More about the Red Pill Mode from the Maemo Wiki here!

So what happened? As you know by now, it was not intended to be used by normal users so after many curious users got their devices wiped out or damaged in one or another way (and reflashed afterward), finally the Red Pill Mode was removed from Maemo5 51-1 forwards. So last firmware that has Red Pill functionality is Maemo 5 2009.44-1 for Nokia N900.

Now, many of you will say too bad, but hey, if you get yourself reading and start to understand how things work on your Nokia N900 you can get the same functionality of the Red Pill simply by getting root access on your N900 and learning a few shell commands.

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