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Having to deal with textwork on your N900? Well, perhaps you’ll have to use copy-pasting from time to time, and then you’ll find it nice to have all your copied text to be saved for future use. Clipman is a clipboard manager that can help you with that.

Fetch Clipboard from Extras with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install clipman
and launch it, now all the text you’ll copy to your clipboard will be saved to a small database, so when you decide to copy something else, you can always go back and return the text you’ve copied in the first place by pressing the button in Clipman’s window. Simple.
One problem with Clipman is that you’ll have to leave it running in order for it to work,  no daemon-like functionality, but that is bearable, as you’ll probably wouldn’t want it running when not doing heavy textwork.
So, Clipman is fairly good clipboard manager and certainly worth having it in your application base.

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If you’ve been using the N900 for a while, perhaps you have been thinking on “how can I record my screen?”. Well, today we’ll show you how.
First of all, fetch a .deb package you will need for recording to your N900, put it anywhere.  You may, of course, use wget to ease the process:
wget http://sumoudou.org/n900/load-applet-ximagesrc_0.4.4-2_armel.deb
Next, install the package:
sudo gainroot
dpkg -i load-applet-ximagesrc*.deb
And install the missing dependencies:
apt-get -f install
There, now you have a little panel on your N900 that will allow you to record your screen (and make screenshots, if you’re not comfortable with Ctrl-Shift-P):

When you press the button that I showed above and exit the statusbar menu, recording will start and you can now make videos, like this one I made. When you press the button again recording will stop. And yes, it will also record sound from the microphone, however the audio input is rather sensitive and will capture screentapping sounds and keyboard, so you might want to mute the sound, like I did. You will find your video in your Videos folder (~/MyDocs/.videos). By pressing the camera button to the right you can take screenshots, tap it and press the camera button (on the top of your N900) to take a screenshot which will land in your images directory.
Enjoy your new screencasting experience!
 

Thanks to ShiroiKuma for putting up the package together.

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Ever wanted to control your desktop computer right from your N900‘s screen? This post will show you how to do that using PresenceVNC.
This guide is for *nix (GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS) users. Windows users can look up a guide on setting up VNC online and try the same, by connecting to their PC directly, however, without ssh this will be much less secure.
First of all, fetch PresenceVNC from your N900:
sudo gainroot
sudo apt-get install presencevnc
Get openssh too, if you don’t have it:
apt-get install openssh
Now, on your PC you’ll need to generate an SSH key (again, if you don’t have it yet):
ssh-keygen -t dsa
This will create a file ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
You will have to drop this file into the same directory from your PC to the N900, you can use file sharing sites, USB, ssh, whatever you want for that.
Verify that you have the SSH server running on your PC, try to SSH into it:
ssh <user>@<ip_address>
Repalce <user> with your username on the PC and <ip_address> with your PC’s IP address. If you don’t know it, use sites like this one. If your PC and the N900 are connected to the same network, you can usually try the local address, 192.168.1.33 or 192.168.1.34. It should ask you to verify the key (type ‘yes’) and your PC’s password. IF it doesn’t then it’s likely your 22nd port is closed, use tools like iptables or Firestarter to open it.
You will also need x11vnc to start the server, look it up in your distro’s repositories.
Once that is set up, open up your N900‘s terminal and connect to your PC with the following command:

ssh -C -L 5900:localhost:5900 <user>@<ip_address>
And start the server (yes, right from your N900)
x11vnc -ncache 10 -display :0
Now, just open up PresenceVNC (don’t quit the terminal!) and connect to localhost:0 Watch in amazement as your PC is fully controlled through your N900.
On the screenshot below you can see IceCat opened on my ArchLinux desktop’s StumpWM:

Enjoy!

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With not so strong aspect of gaming on the N900, some gaming engines can be great, as they can provide us with tons of games to play. Well, there’s one engine ported to the N900 I’d love to tell you about: Ren’Py!

Ren’Py is a visual novel engine which allows you to create and/or play various visual novels. It holds a database of many novels created with it, both by amateurs and some more professional companies. Many well-known VN’s have been created with its help, Katawa Shoujo, for example.
If you don’t know what a visual novel is, in short, it’s a Japanese genre of interactive fiction games, close to those good ol’ “choose-your-own-adventure” game books, but with music and pictures. You can read the article on Wikipedia, if you wish to learn more.
With the Ren’Py port, you’re free to play many of those right on your N900, which may suit you if you’re travelling/waiting for something and wish to kill time. Right now it’s available in Extras-devel only, so go and enable it before running
sudo gainroot
apt-get install renpy-launcher python-renpy
To get it. Disable it afterwards. Before you launch any VN, you’ll need to fix a couple of issues, mainly the keyboard shortcuts and a small issue with text input. Get the patched versions of two config files and force-copy them over the old ones:
wget http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=11071&d=1276592409
wget http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=11122&d=1276701240

sudo gainroot
cp -f main.py.txt /opt/renpy/renpy/main.py
cp -f config.py.txt /opt/renpy/renpy/config.py

After that, you’re free to try any novels from the database or try the small novel shipped with Ren’Py. Most of the games can be launched by extracting them anywhere, cd’ing into them and running
python2.5 /opt/renpy/renpy.py ./
Some may require trickery, like symlinking them to /opt/renpy and launching them from the launcher (with “Select Project” -> “Launch”)
The overall performance of the games is pretty good, although there are a few issues. For example, 95% of the games will have the bottom of the screen cropped when launched in a window (usually by default), so you’ll have to play them fullscreen. And things like click sounds can be huge laggers, you might want to disable them from the options file of the game.
Apart from that, most …

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Have you lost a remote for an infrared device? As long as you have your N900 with Pierogi on it, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Pierogi is a really good (and tasty) infrared remote for your N900, and allows you to control tons of different devices that are already preconfigured into the app. While apps like Raemote and QtIrreco can do the same, Pierogi has a better design in both the UI and the way the app works.
Pieorgi has tons, tons, of keysets preconfigured for just many devices you’d need, even things like air conditioners and there’s no need to download them. All supported and tested devices can be found here, but there might be more. If you have a device not seen on the list, you can request it in this TM thread. The user interface is very nice and understandable, you don’t need to spend hours trying to figure it out. And there’s no need to launch the the LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) daemon, the app speaks directly with the device.
Well, I found every single keyset for devices in my house working well and out of the box, I had much more problems trying to configure them all to work with QtIrecco. So, go on and fetch Pierogi off Extras, or even better, Extras-devel (as that version has more devices and some bugs fixed) and stop worrying about missing remotes!
 

Thanks to our reader, Salut Ct for suggesting the app. Have your own suggestions? Please leave them in the comments or on our forum!

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Note: This guide is aimed only at advanced users. Messing something up during the installation might break your device, so do not attempt anything, unless you are sure you can handle it.
With the “hackability” of the N900 there’s quite a lot of alternative mobile operating systems available for it. We already covered NITDroid and Mer, and today I’m going to direct you through the installation of another mobile system I find very promising, SHR.
SHR is a GNU/Linux based OS that is available for quite many devices, all of which can be found by surfing through the project’s wiki. Surely, for a mobile OS, it can perform phone calls, end SMS, use GPS all while being a well-working GNU/Linux system, just like Maemo is. So, onto installation.
You will require all these things:

A Nokia N900, updated to a latest PR (which is 1.3).
A MicroSD card with a large capacity (at least 4 gB).

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.

U-Boot installed on your 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 PC with a cardreader.
An N900 Image of SHR

Get the image from here.
The guide assumes you’re using a *nix machine. Windows users can use a small GNU/Linux LiveCD for following the guide.
Now, slot your MicroSD card into your cardreader. You’ll want to repartition it.
If you don’t understand the repartition process via a commandline, you can use GParted or a similar partitioning manager.
Verify the name of the SD device with
sudo fdisk -l
It should look like /dev/sdX with X being a letter. Make sure it’s the correct device name by mounting it or otherwise checking.
If you have automounting enabled, unmount the card:
sudo umount <card_mount_point>
Run fdisk on the card:
fdisk /dev/sdX
Obviously, replace sdX with your actual device name. For testing purposes, just a single ext3 partition is okay:
Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First …

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Note: this how-to is aimed at advanced users. Messing something up during the installation or usage may harm your device, everything is done at your own risk.
Being an ultimate hacker device, the N900 is often prone to getting software issues during your playful experiments. When that happens, don’t go strait to reflashing your device, it may still be rescued with a rescue initrd image provided by MeeGo! This how-to will show you how to install and use the initrd image for rescuing your N900.

The first part of the how-to assumes you’re using a *nix system (GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS) on your PC , information on Windows installation can be found below.
On your PC, open up the terminal. Make a new directory, where the image will be kept, and cd into it:
mkdir n900-rescue-initrd
cd n900-rescue-initrd
Now, get the rpm files for the image from the MeeGo repos:
wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.1/core/repos/armv7l/packages/armv7l/nokia-n900-rescue-initrd-0.1-2.157.armv7l.rpm
wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.1/core/repos/armv7l/packages/armv7l/kernel-n900-2.6.35.3-10.3.armv7l.rpm
Now, you’ll need to unpack the rpm packages using rpm2cpio. If you don’t have it, it should be available from your distribution’s repos. Else, you might try using a BASH or Perl versions, execute them the same way, as you would execute rmp2cpio.
rpm2cpio nokia-n900-*.rpm | cpio -vid ./boot/initrd*
rpm2cpio kernel-*n900-*.rpm | cpio -vid ./boot/vmlinuz*
Now you will have a directory named boot that will contain the files required.
Before you start the initrd charge your battery completely. The initrd doesn’t support charging and you want to be sure your phone won’t die when the initrd is in use.
To start the initrd, you’ll need to use the N900 flasher, please read this article, if you don’t understand what I mean. Note, we’re not reflashing the device, we’re just loading the image into the device’s memory on boot.
Shutdown the device by removing the battery and putting it back, then start the flasher in the same directory with
sudo flasher-3.5 -k boot/<vmlinuz-n900> -n boot/<initrd.img> -l -b”rootdelay=1 root=/dev/ram0″
Replace <vmlinuz-n900> and <initrd.img> with the actual file names.
After it is started, plug your N900 to your PC with a USB cord. Your device should now boot and you’ll get a menu with the following features:

Toggle USB networking on/off (N)
Reboot the device (R)
Shutdown the device …

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Learning Japanese, or wish to start? Maemo port of a libre desktop program Kanatest can help you learn both katakana and hiragana characters.

Kanatest will test your knowledge by showing you kana characters and having you type in their romaji equivalents. At the end, your statistics will be shown, and later you can compare your older results with your new ones.
What makes it a really-really good piece of learning software are tons of helpful functions and features, like translations of the program to other languages, definable lessons together with many predefined ones, a complete character chart, test on either kata, hira or both, the aforementioned statistics, which can be shown in a nice graph or table, minor things, like font customization.

Kanatest can be fetched from Extras, there are no differences with the Devel or Testing versions, find it under Education section in a graphical package manager or simply run:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install kanatest
So, if you’re into learning Japanese, go check the app out. It will be worth it.

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Doing some math that requires you to calculate derivatives? Rather than calculating them yourself, you might want to let a calculator do it for you. Derivative is rather good one.

Derivatives runs on SymPy, which is a powerful symbolic math library and allows Derivative have a couple of interesting features. Mainly, Derivative can count all types (ordinary, partial and multiple) of derivatives from 1 to 3 variables, calculates gradient, divergent, curl and laplacian, has support for many output formats (from simple and bidimensional to even LaTeX, C and Fortran), simplification methods for non-numerical calculations, support for variable names like alpha, lambda etc. and much more. Of course, it’s completely free software. Just fetch the app from Extras with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install derivative
and check all the features for yourself.

Have questions or suggestions? Maybe a problem? Drop us a comment or leave a post on our forum and we’ll look into it.

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Interested in listening to net radio, with recommendations and such, but don’t want to use paid services like Last.fm? Try Pandora Radio, it’s free and easy to use on your N900 or N9 with a good client that is PyRadio.

While available in the Extras, that version seems to have a serious issue with authenticating, so fetch one from Extras-Devel or Extras-Testing, which works like a charm. Just make sure to disable the repo after you fetched it, unless you actually want them enabled.
If you have a username at Pandora, just type it in with your password and you’re set. If not, create one. Now, you’re free to add stations, and listen to them on the go from your N900!
Liking tracks, adding/creating stations and other things are working on the client perfectly, and, unlike Last.fm it’s absolutely free to use, so why not?
 

Please note, that for quite a while Pandora has been off limits for non-US residents. While I seem to connect without a problem (and I don’t live in the US), you may experience problems. If you do (try checking by launching pyRadio from the command line), try using Tor.

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Whenever you’re surfing the net, you do want to be concerned about your online privacy. A lot of information can get to the wrong hands if you don’t. One of the good ways to protect your network privacy is an onion router: Tor.
Now if you don’t know what onion routing is, in short, using it will have your connections bounce through many various Tor servers before reaching their destination. Everything is encrypted, which will make tracking down your path difficult, thus keeping your identity safe. The picture below shows exactly how it works:

With Maemo being a complete GNU/Linux distribution, it shouldn’t be a surprise that you can use Tor there, very easily, and with a status applet for your convenience. If you want to use it, just fetch off a package from Extras:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install status-area-applet-tor
The package will pull down Tor as one of its dependencies, so yes, you can now use Tor to protect yourself, just open up your status area menu and you’ll see a button!

Click it, and you’ll be able to run Tor and have your network connection routed. Very easy.
 

When using Tor you should note two things:
1. Now your connections are bouncing through various servers, so the connection is slower than it usually is. You have to pay for your anonymity.
2. Even Tor has  it’s weaknesses, and besides that there are other ways to identify you, if somebody needs that, like flash cookies, fingerprinting, etc. so don’t rely on it strongly and don’t think you can do naughty stuff on the net without getting caught.

Have questions or suggestions? Maybe a problem? Drop us a comment or leave a post on our forum and we’ll look into it.

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Concerned about the health of your N900? Healthcheck can help you out not only to check your phone for hardware failures, but also to view your system information easily.

Get it off extras with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install healthcheck
Healthcheck will allow you to view various bits of info, as you can see on the screenshot above, from your IMEI to hardware status. As the app name suggests, this will help you determine whether there’s something wrong with your N900.
You can also check your total memory status in a nice table, GSM information, CPU frequencies, other things, but the best part of it all are various tests you can run to check for hardware issues. Such as the pointer test, to check whether there’s anything wrong with your display.

Having all that functionality, healthcheck is a really good app to keep your phone in a good condition.

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Find your mobile carrier’s SMS rates a bit too high? Well, there’s a solution: you can send SMS via internet easily using Web2SMS!

Web2SMS is available in the Extras repository, so just run
sudo gainroot
apt-get install web2sms
to install it.
Once launched, you can set yourself up an account. Web2SMS supports many providers, so pick one that suits you from the list. You will need to register on the provider’s website. Of course, the rates for SMS sending vary from provider to provider.
Then, just tap the created account name and send a message to anyone. Selecting a contact from your contact list works too. The time it takes to send a message depends on your provider, some may take longer than others.

So, if you don’t like the rates your mobile carrier sets, or if you just want to save up some money, use Web2SMS. Most of the time it will be cheaper than sending them like you would normally.

Please note: some mobile carriers in certain countries may not like you using such methods of sending. Please read their terms of service to see, whether they allow it or not.

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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 …

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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 …