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If you have an N900, it’s highly unlikely you’ve got an outdated firmware.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!

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.

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

Are you in a liking of chess games? Playing with the AI doesn’t seem as good as playing with real players for you? Then you should totally check out Miniature, an FICS client for Maemo!

Miniature is currently only available at Extras-devel, which means you would want it enabled in your repo list. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean the game is not good enough for everyday use, I myself have tested many releases and they work perfectly. In case if you need help enabling it, check out this wiki article. Make sure to disable it right after downloading the package though.

Now, Miniature enables you to play games hosted at FICS with thousands of players all across the world and even allows you to play P2P games with people nearby or with people in your contacts list. Registering at FICS is not required, but is recommended, if you want to keep easy track of your own games and stats. Host a game or join one of those already available and you’re ready to dive into a nice game of chess with anyone. And you even have easy to use text chat!

Miniature also holds quite some learning possibilities, as you can watch games already played, view chess lessons and participate in one of the tournaments FICS often holds! In case if you would want to play different kinds of chess, like antichess, Miniature allows that too.

A great client for every chess player, or just somebody who would want a nice game while waiting for the bus to arrive, Miniature is definitely worth checking out.

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

Do you like strategy games? Well, then you probably have heard of “The Battle for Wesnoth”, a popular free software turn based strategy game with a strong, Tolkienesque fantasy setting. But did you know that there is a complete port of this PC game for Maemo?

The game is currently available in Extras, you can find it in the Games category.

sudo gainroot

apt-get install wesnoth

Note that the game is pretty large and will consume about 240~ Mb of memory on your /opt Unpacking a large package can also take a lot of time, so make sure you have enough battery charge.

Optionally install the music files. (Not recommended as this will take up 100 Mb more of memory and will slow down the game a bit):

apt-get install wesnoth-music

Once installed, you can launch the game from your applications menu or with

wesnoth

Loading times can be a drag, but apart from that and a few resolution issues with menus, the game is completely playable. Add-ons, Multiplayer, Singleplayer campaigns are all functional. I was able to both finish one of the mainline campaigns and play co-op survival on the official server without any trouble, right with an N900 in my hand.

The Battle for Wesnoth is definitely a game every N900 gamer should take a look at. So install the package and dive into the world of dwarves, elves and orcs!

Quite often do we run into situations where certain calls are unwanted. Maybe you’re at work and you don’t want anybody outside of the working environment calling you, or maybe there’s just a certain annoying person who you don’t want to talk with. In any case, Callerx is a simple app that will help you solve these problems.

Once launched, you will be greeted with a screen that easily allows you to view all inbound calls and manage your lists with blocked/allowed phone numbers.

Adding new numbers or contacts to the list of blocked/allowed numbers can be done by pressing the ‘Manage Lists’ button, choosing a list of your choice and picking a menu option. It’s that simple.

Callerx also allows you to block any numbers that are not listed by enabling the whitelist mode and has an option to block all unknown numbers.

Being a daemon, it is configured to auto-start at each boot, and can be configured via a command line, by editing ‘blacklist.txt’ and ‘whitelist.txt’ files located under your MyDocs directory and calling

/etc/init.d/callerx loadblacklist for switching to blacklist mode or

/etc/init.d/callerx loadwhitelist for whitelist mode

Easy to use and effective, Callerx is all you need to stop any unwanted calls from ever bothering you.

Tweaks posted here are for advanced users. Any beginners can give it a go, and if any problems occurs feel free to discuss it in the forums.

1. Enabling Hardware Accelerator which would speed up the hildon-desktop ( currently unstable and requires disabling if not working. Might need to reflash in case of reboot loop ).

First using XTerm, run this command

sudo gainroot

leafpad /etc/powervr.d/hildon-desktop.ini

Then change

WSEGL_UseHWSync=0

to

WSEGL_UseHWSync=1

 2) Installing Swappolube

sudo gainroot

apt-get install swappolube

Then use proposed values and click store

3) Install tracker-cfg to allow tracker using less CPU power

sudo gainroot

apt-get install tracker-cfg

Launch it and set to lowmemorymode

Any other tips and tricks are welcome. Just leave a comment and we will post it in our upcoming posts

via : Talk Maemo

NITDroid have been running over the years on the N900 and here is the current latest update :

Latest stable Android version running on the N900 is Version 2.3.7. Well this is practically a Gingerbread OS with Google Wallet support. This version is called N12 for NITDroid for the N900

N12 includes receiving and sending SMS successfully. However voice calls and camera are still under development

Here is a list with compatible games being able to run on the NITDroid itself. Overclocking and installation on internal EMMC would be suggested to ensure smooth game play.

And on the day the Ice Cream Sandwich source code is being released, a port of ICS has been done for the N900. Credits to the NITDroid developer drunkdebugger. Here is the link to the video : Video

Let’s hope more updates would come soon and we can get a stable NITDroid to replace Maemo for the N900.

Have you ever seen meedieval castle with lots of potraits hanging around? Every single one reminds of great man, someone who did something really significant for country, region or family. Today let’s focus on some other portrait, the one related to our favourite phone, Nokia N900.

Landscape setting of homescreen items

Portrait setting of homescreen items

Portrait dashboard is something we could already see after previous CSSU update, so the only remaining thing was to propagate this feature to homescreen, which finally happened. Because everyday I see less and less news on N900 I feel obliged to mention it for the ones who haven’t yet updated.

I was a bit surprised that after update my N900 just switched to portrait mode after rotating it, but widgets, shortcuts and bookmarks were a bit messed up. It’s still not a problem, because portrait has its own setting for each homescreen, so you can easily rearrange all of your widgets on screen and make them look exactly as you want. Unfortunatelly some of really wide widgets (like 5 days weather forecast) just won’t fit in portrait, but I can live with that, can you?

Another tiny issue with portrait mode is loopable wallpaper, if you haveone that loops in landscape, it will probably make you feel uncomfortable, but for me it’s perfect situation for new inventions, wallpaper that will be loopable in potrait and landscape at the same time. I’ll surely share with you when I find some time to make one .

That’s enough for starters, our King is still alive, still breathing and has own portrait . Now that you know what comes with the latest update, just try it!

–

MJ

Don’t have enough knowledge reading the Quran? Or don’t understand? Then Noor is the perfect application for you!! All you need is a Nokia N900, Noor and a chair to sit on It has a good appearance for the user and for easy reading, it has the Quran verses first followed by the English meaning directly beneath it.

Very useful if you’re in a journey to somewhere and don’t access to a Quran. Noor comes in 7 different languages namely : en English(default), ar Arabic, fa Farsi, ml Malayalam, ps Pushto, tr Turkish, nl Dutch.

Change the code : lang = (language of preference) in home/user/.noor and you can use leafpad, nano, vi or any other editor to do this. Not every device has the ability to support this application as only Python compatible devices are usable here. You need to have certain things before installing Noor :

noorgtk, noorhtmls, noorcgi and noortxt. All of this does come with the default Linux distributions like Ubuntu.

To install Noor, you input python setup.py install then after that, from any location noorgtk.pyw must be inputed. Stay tuned to this website for more.