Interested in installing another OS on your N900? Well, then you might want to try Mer, a libre operating system based on MeeGo. This guide will teach you how to install it using a Windows system. If you’re a *nix (GNU/Linux; BSD; MacOS) user, refer to this post.

First of all all, you’d want to have all these things:

• A Nokia N900, updated to a latest PR (which is 1.3).

If you have an N900, it’s highly unlikely you’ve got an outdated firmware. However, if you do (check it in About Product), please refer to this article.

• A MicroSD card with a capacity of at least 4GiB.

Class and brand of the SD card plays a huge role here. A class 10 card is preferable. Cards are mostly “what-you-pay-is-what-you-get”, so the more expensive card is usually the better one. Do read the benchmark test for the card, you’d want the one that has a high random read/write.

• U-Boot installed on the N900

Get U-boot from Extras-devel, if you don’t have it. Reboot the phone to verify installation, there should be a mention of U-Boot and usually a picture of Tux (a penguin) in a corner. Make sure to disable extras-devel after installing U-boot.

• A Windows PC with a cardreader.
• And an image for Nemo Mobile

Get an appropriate image here. Latest release have been proven to have a bug when installing on an SD card, so look for an older release.

Once you have all that, onto installation!

First, you need something to open a bz2 file for you and unpack the image. If you don’t have anything, try BZip2 for Windows:

• Get the release without sources from the link above.
• Install BZip2
• Put the bz2 file into a directory, where you installed BZip2
• Press Win + R to open up Run, type in “cmd” in the input box.
• Change directory (cd) to the one, where you have bzip2 and the image file. For example, if the directory is C:\Programs\Bzip2\, type in “cd c:\Programs\Bz2″
• Type in “bzip2.exe <name_of_the_image_file>.bz2″

Obviously, replace <name_of_the_image_file>.bz2 with an actual image name.

After you unpacked the image, you’ll want to rename it from <image>.raw to <image>.img. Do so.

Now get an image writer for Windows here (get the latest release and unpack the zip file into any directory). Slot in your MicroSD card into the cardreader. Run the image writer (W32DiskImager.exe). Select the img file you unpacked earlier and the drive letter of your SD card (verify the correct letter by checking it in Computer), then click ‘Write’. After the writing is finished, take the card out of the card reader and put it in your N900. Turn it on and Nemo shall begin booting. Note that the first boot will be a rather long one, later boots will be faster. If you want to boot into Maemo instead, just remove the SD card from your N900.

Enjoy your new OS!

Interested in installing another OS on your N900? Well, then you might want to try Mer, a libre operating system based on MeeGo. This guide will teach you how to install it using a *nix (GNU/Linux; BSD; and, technically, MacOS) system. If you’re a Windows user, refer to this post.

First of all all, you’d want to have all these things:

• A Nokia N900, updated to a latest PR (which is 1.3).

If you have an N900, it’s highly unlikely you’ve got an outdated firmware. However, if you do (check it in About Product), please refer to this article.

• A MicroSD card with a capacity of at least 4GiB.

Class and brand of the SD card plays a huge role here. A class 10 card is preferable. Cards are mostly “what-you-pay-is-what-you-get”, so the more expensive card is usually the better one. Do read the benchmark test for the card, you’d want the one that has a high random read/write.

• U-Boot installed on the N900

Get U-boot from Extras-devel, if you don’t have it. Reboot the phone to verify installation, there should be a mention of U-Boot and usually a picture of Tux (a penguin) in a corner. Make sure to disable extras-devel after installing U-boot.

• A *nix PC with a cardreader.
• And an image for Nemo Mobile

Get an appropriate image here. Latest release have been proven to have a bug when installing on an SD card, so look for an older release.

Once you have all that, onto installation!

Slot in your MicroSD card into a cardreader. Find out the name of the card device with

sudo fdisk -l

If you have automounting enabled, you’ll want to unmount the card:

sudo umount /dev/<name_of_the_card_partition>

Replace <name_of_the_card_partition> with an actual name of your card’s partition. Usually it’s something like “/dev/sdx1″

Now, write an image to a device with dd:

sudo dd bs=4096 if=<full_path_to_the_image> of=/dev/<name_of_the_card_device>

NOTE: the <name_of_the_card_device> is an actual device, not a partition. So, if your partition was named /dev/sdx1, you’ll want to use /dev/sdx as <name_of_the_card_device>

Replace <full_path_to_the_image> with a (duh) full path to your Nemo Mobile image you downloaded, unpacked from the bz2 file.

If your card doesn’t have sufficient space, use this command instead. Replace <full_path_to_the_image> with the name of the bz2 file, not the image inside it.

bzcat <full_path_to_image>.bz2 | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sdX

dd won’t show any output (*nix-way, after all) until it has finished copying, so be patient. Depending on the quality of your card, this might take a short, or a long while.

Once dd has finished copying, take the card out of the card reader and put it in your N900. Turn it on and Nemo shall begin booting. Note that the first boot will be a rather long one, later boots will be faster. If you want to boot into Maemo instead, just remove the SD card from your N900.

Enjoy your new OS!

Interested in video calling from your N900? You probably know about Skype, but there are better alternatives available, like SIP.

SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, is a signalling protocol, which is used mostly for controlling video and audio calls. And Maemo has a good native support for it! Let’s see how to setup an SIP account on your N900.

Before everything else, you’d want to get yourself an SIP account. There are literally hundreds of providers, so find one that suits you, just look them up in a search engine, like Google.

After you get one, you’ll want to go to your account settings. If you already have defined an account for other services, you can access the menu by pressing the “Availability” button on your notification menu. If not, you can find it under “Settings->VoIP and IM Accounts”. Add a new account, choose SIP as service. You’ll see a similar box to popup:

Now, just input your SIP address and password. Take Advanced Settings into account, most providers will require you to put in an outbound proxy and define a username. Refer to instructions on your provider’s website on whether you should put them there. Save everything and enable the account, login by switching the status to ‘Available”. Now, you’re ready to call SIP addresses and make regular calls via SIP, just select your SIP account as a call type in your Phone app. Video calling is available too, just find a contact you wish to call, select it and choose to videocall.

SIP is a very good (and much more open) alternative to Skype, so why not use it?

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Thanks to our reader, Steven O’ Dochartaigh, who asked us to do this how-to. Have your own suggestions? Put them up in the comments, or on our forum, and we’ll be sure to give them a look!

Everybody occasionally needs to make a sketch or write something. But oftentimes, there just might not be a piece of paper or anything to write with lying around. On such occasions, you might want a handy sketching tool around.

The N900 sure comes with a stock “Sketch” app, but you sure might notice it might be pretty slow and unresponsive. But hey, there’s a better one available! Try PenPen.

There’s a variety of reasons, why PenPen is a good sketching app. First of all, it’s fast and responsive, whatever you will be writing will appear on your virtual paper almost instantly. Next, it has some very good support for portrait mode. Finally, there’s multiple page support, which means you can easily separate different drawings.

PenPen is currently available at the Extras repository, so just get it with

sudo gainroot

apt-get install penpen

If your job or hobbies include a lot of sketching, like mine do, then PenPen is a good thing to have on your N900. If you’re in a worry of your screen getting damaged, or just want to get a better experience from your mobile sketching, you might also want to grab a good screen protector from our store.

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Have a suggestion? A problem? Post them on our forum or in the comments and we’ll look into it.

If you’re interested in saving up battery, here’s a little how-to on adding a desktop-cmd-exec button that will enable/disable WiFi completely upon being pressed.

First, get desktop command execution widget, if you don’t have it already:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install desktop-cmd-exec

Next you would want to get an enable/disable script. For your convenience, I’ve uploaded it to Pastebin: http://pastebin.com/3ZHx11GZ

Copy the script and save it as wifi.sh in your home directory. Make it executable:

chmod +x wifi.sh

Now, to add the button. Switch to a desktop where you wish to place it, go to edit mode (long tap on the screen or tap on an empty space and tap the gear button that appears on top). Add Desktop Command Execution Widget from the menu, and click the wrench on the widget that appeared. Select the “Add cmd” option on the right. Name the command “Enable/Disable WiFi” or however you’d like, in command put this:

echo “/home/user/wifi.sh” | sudo gainroot | echo “”

Add the command, you’ll be kicked back to the edit mode, so press the wrench again. You’ll see that the new command was already chosen (if it is not, chose it), so you need just to adjust a few options, check the “Update on click” option and uncheck “Update on boot” and “Update on desktop change” buttons. Ta-da! Now you have a button to completely disable the WiFi when you don’t need it and enable it on need, which will save up quite some battery charge.

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Of course, you can utilize the script otherwise, like adding an Alarmed job to disable/enable wifi on certain times.

With all the latest hype about QR-codes, you must certainly would want a QR scanner on your phone. Especially if you’re living in Japan, where QR-codes are most popular.

Well, the N900 sure has a QR-scanner, and a pretty good one! mBarCode, together with a QR plugin can read both barcode and QR information.

You can get both mBarCode and the QR-plugin from the Extras repo:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install mbarcode mbarcode-plugin-qrcode

Launch the application and now you have a very good scanner! Target your camera at a QR or a barcode and the information gets read almost instantly. Links and other “can-be-malicious” content is shown to you before getting opened with your tap. You can even check the shortlinks by copying them and visiting this site.

You can also store the scanned code into a file, or read the code from a file you stored. That way you can use the codes later, or scan the codes downloaded from a website.

With all that, mBarCode is a must-have if you’re used to dealing with QR and barcodes.

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In case if you’d want to test how it works and you don’t have any scannable codes around, you can use an online generator, like this one.

If you happen to run a GNU/Linux machine and often play video games, then you might have heard of Teeworlds. If you didn’t hear about it yet, Teeworld is a retro-styled 2-D online side-scroller, which has pretty graphics, fast-paced gameplay with the well-known game mods: CTF, Deathmatch, etc. A lot of user-created content is available for the game, including extra modes, maps, and graphical sets.  Well, thanks to the Maemo being a complete GNU/Linux distribution, Teeworlds is surely available for playing on your N900!

The package for Teeworlds is available in Extras and you can install it with

sudo gainroot

apt-get install teeworlds

Once installed, you can launch it and see how actually well does the PC game run on your phone. Teeworlds starts up pretty smoothly, can access all the servers, settings and everything else. While you might think that the N900 keyboard might not be suitable for playing, the default key bindings prove otherwise, the game is played fairly well. If you don’t like the bindings, of course you can set your own.

Another point for Maemo’s power as a mobile platform, such a game is definitely worth trying, so check it out!

Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) - it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!

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Note: the steps we go through this how-to include modifying low-level system files and imply that the readers know what they are doing. If you can’t understand some bits or think you might break something, you might want not to try this hack.

Interested in further customization of your N900? Then let’s take a look at how to change that “Swipe to unlock” screen that appears when you press the powerkey with screen locked.

The files we’re interested in are located under two directories:

 /usr/share/themes/alpha/backgrounds/

and

/usr/share/themes/alpha/images/

Now, the files are lockslider.png, which is a background image located in the first directory mentioned; LockSliderTop/Bottom/Left/Right.png, which are the backgounds for the slider itself and are located in the second directory mentioned; and, finally, LockSliderThumb.png and LockSliderPortrait.png, which are the images for the slider button in landscape and portrait mode. These are also in the second directory mentioned.

You know the file names now, so you’d want to get creative and make substitutes for those originals! Back them up, if you need it.

Use the original files as a base, you need to be sure the image sizes match. That is, lockslider.png needs to be 800×480, other files need to be the same size as their originals. Check out this custom set for further example.

As soon as you finished creating your files, drop them all to their respective directories and reboot your phone.

  cp -f lockslider.png  /usr/share/themes/alpha/backgrounds/

cp -f LockSlider*.png /usr/share/themes/alpha/images/

sudo gainroot

reboot

Enjoy your new custom Swipe-to-unlock screen!

Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) - it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!

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Need to take a couple of notes? Simple calendar notes and/or text files not enough for you? Then check out Conboy, a clone of Tomboy, which is a very good note management program!

As soon as you get the package (which is available in the Extras repository) and run the app, powerful note managing capabilities will unfold on your screen. Conboy allows text formatting, text alignment, zoom and quite some extra stuff, all of which you can check by looking around the menus and the interface. And it’s all quite readable and manageable!

By pressing that little folder icon, you’ll get a list of all your notes, which can all be searched, sorted, deleted, edited… All management operations are handled quite well, which makes Conboy even better.

So, if you keep forgetting things, or if you’re used to taking a lot of notes, like I am, then Conboy is surely a must have on your Nokia N900.

Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) - it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!

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No doubt, your phone must be something very valuable for most of you. If so, you will want to keep it away from thieves. HandsOff is a handy app that will help you with that.

HandsOff is a simple alarm tool that will detect possible theft of your N900, using light and proximity sensors. Just type in a PIN-code and, well, press the big red button on top.

After armed, as soon as your N900 leaves the area where it’s supposed to be, a loud alarm will notify you about it right away, and might prevent a theft. Surely, the alarm won’t stop, unless a proper PIN-code is entered. You can also set your own alarm sound and sensitivity, so you can carry the phone in your pocket. You might want to tweak the settings a bit, until your desired settings are discovered.

Even something that relatively small can prevent a theft, so if you’re paranoid, or just want to keep your N900 safe, you should probably try HandsOff.