[scotsman]

Hi Kent,

thanks for informing about the cables. Now I can almost 100% assure you that when you plug in your new cable, nothing will happen. This is because a) I have once tried it with just bridging the pins with a needle, and b) because as it is, no appropriate driver is running on the device.
Somehow, when you plug in your PC, the DR detects it (when it asks you whether you wnt to mount), and when you say yes, it seems to load some driver to operate the device in gadget (slave/device, not host) mode. Naturally, in this state there is no way of executing a shell script with "lsmod", so there is no way I can tell what module is loaded.
One way to go were to find out which script is executed when mounting the device. I could try that on the emulator maybe, if the script is there, (on the emulator it is not such a pain to browse through directories and "cat" files then on the device - see my "terminal workaround" post).

On your open device, could you check where the usb is wired to? Are all pins connected to the freescale? It is clear that all pins are wired somewhere, since otherwise you could not charge the device and transfer data. The question, however, is wheter the power pins go to the freescale CPU as well, or to some charging circuit. This is important because we will need power out of the socket, which will only come from the CPU's USB controller.

Also, while your hardware solution will work fine (just search for USB OTG Nokia N800), once the right driver is in place, it should be possible to switch to host mode via software only. The Nokia N8x0's do that, for example. But again, the driver needs to be loaded first, and that's where I am stuck now.