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Using MMS? Or want to try? Well, unfortunately, N900 doesn’t support MMS out-of-the-box, but fMMS can help us with that! In this guide, I will show you how to setup fMMS on your N900.

First, get fMMS from the Extras repository with these commands:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install fmms
Now, for the settings! Run fMMS and go to the settings:

Once there, tap another Settings button. Now go to this page and carefully fill in all the information for your mobile carrier. Make sure to double-check all the settings after you did so, a typo in the AP name can cost you quite a lot (literally, your carrier might charge you heavily if you try to connect to a wrong AP).
Now, a little note, if the data on the wiki page says “Use Proxy: No”, you will have to take another few steps:
1. Tap the system Menu button, go to Settings -> Internet connections -> Connections -> MMS -> Edit
2. Tap Next -> Next -> Advanced
3. Uncheck the “Use proxy” checkbox and click Save.
If it says “Use Proxy: Yes”, ignore the above and continue.
Now to test all your settings, set the “Polite” Setting in the fMMS settings menu and (via the statusbar menu) connect to an internet connection called “MMS”. Open up MicroB and go to the MMSC URL you put in fMMS settings (don’t worry, unless your carrier is crazy and charges for receiving MMS, you won’t lose money). If everything is setup correctly, you should have a blank page. If you have something like “HTTP Response: 400″ or any text like that, then you’ve got something wrong, check all your settings again.

There, now fMMS is set up and you can send and receive MMS messages! If you have still have any troubles (after you’ve passed the testing), please see the Troubleshooting here.
Enjoy!

Guide requested by Steven Kierath, our reader. Have your own suggestions/requests/problems? Contact us on our Facebook page (you can find the link on the homepage) or send me an email.

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Just yesterday, I was on my way home. Usually, I listen to the music while out on the street, but my audio player wasn’t with me and it’s been a while since I have uploaded any fresh music into my N900. Luckily, I had all my music on my home PC (which was conveniently running) and with an N900, I sure can access and listen to it. Want to know how? I’ll show you in this guide.

This guide assumes the machine you’re connecting to runs a *nix system (GNU/Linux, BSD, MacOS). For getting SSH up with Windows, refer to this guide by Lifehacker.
First things first, you would want to have SSH running on your machine with the music. Make sure you start it and have the SSH port unlocked on the machine.
If you are unsure how to do that, see this guide for Ubuntu, which will work for most other GNU/Linux distros with minor changes, or refer to your system’s documentation.
Obviously, you also need OpenSSH on your N900, which you can get with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install openssh
if you don’t have it already. Now, let’s look at the methods you can use to start playing music from a remote machine on your N900.
You can use MPlayer + SSH. This is a faster, but a slightly inconvenient way, for which you need MPlayer on your N900.
If you don’t have it, get it with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install mplayer
Then, you can use this command:
ssh <user>@<remote-address> “cat <full-path-to-file>” | mplayer -
Where <user> is your username on the machine, <remote-address> is your machine’s IP address and <full-path-to-file> is the full path to the file you want to play.
The inconvenience of this is that you won’t be able to play many files at once and you’ll have to use the full path to the file.
A better method is sshfs. Again, if you don’t have sshfs, grab it with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install sshfs
Create a directory, which you’ll use (as root):
mkdir /home/user/Home-PC
Finally, mount your machine’s filesystem on that directory with sshfs:
sshfs <user>@<remote-address>: /home/user/Home-PC
There, you can now access the whole home directory of your home PC via /home/user/Home-PC and that means (besides other files) you can …

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Note: this how-to is aimed at advanced users. Messing something up may harm your device, everything is done at your own risk.
Want to keep record of all your call durations? Well, while the functionality is not included by default, there’s a hack that can help you out. All we need to do is to patch the SQL database.
Note: You don’t need to be root for following the guide.
Open up your X Terminal and cd into a folder we need:
cd /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger
Make a backup of your original database file, just to be sure:
cp -a el-v1.db el-v1.db.backup
Download the patch (you’ll need wget, if you don’t have it, install it with sudo gainroot; apt-get install wget):
wget ‘http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=10495&amp;d=1275242093′ -O triggers.txt
Apply the patch:
sqlite3 -batch /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el-v1.db < triggers.txt
Finally, install Extended Call Log from Extras:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install extcalllog 
You’re finished! Now the call durations will start recording. Please note that it will just start, so you’ll need to go through a couple of calls before you can see the durations.

Enjoy!

Thanks to kovach from TMO for the patch.

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Prone to falling asleep while listening to music? But of course trying to do that with your N900 will simply waste battery life while you are sleeping. Well, then you want to stop the player, but you can’t really do that when you’re asleep, can’t you? Ah, but you can, thanks to Sleeper.

After installing Sleeper, you will now have a widget that, upon pressing, will start a timer. After the time desired will pass, Sleeper will pause your N900 or shut it down, depending on your settings. You can customize the look of the widget and the times you wish to use in minutes.
Sleeper is available in Extras, so fetch it with:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install sleeper
And enjoy Sleeper.
A simple, but maybe a life-saving widget, because, hey, sometimes it’s just nice to fall asleep while listening to some beautiful music, right? Especially if you have some sleep problems.

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Often you wouldn’t even want any phone functionality from your N900, unless you are actually using it often. When you don’t want it, disabling every cellular function seems reasonable, as it will save you up a lot of battery life, but unfortunately, Nokia’s Flight Mode turns off any radio functionality, and that includes WiFi and other communications. But, luckily, there’s a savior for those who would want some connectivity with cellular functions temporary disabled ? Tablet Mode!
After getting a package from Extras, you will now have a flashy button in your powerkey menu, which, upon pressing will enable (or, obviously disabling, if you had it enabled already) the Tablet Mode, allowing you to use your N900 as a regular tablet with no phone functionality saving you up quite some battery life.

Surely a must-have on your N900, so install the package with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install cell-modem-ui
And enjoy the tablet mode!

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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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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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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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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 …

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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!

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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.

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Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) - it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!
Want to read some of your favorite articles on Wikipedia? But what if you don’t have any internet available for some reason? Or maybe you just want to save up money or battery charge for keeping internet connection.
Evopedia will allow you to download an archive of all Wikipedia articles and read them online, optimized for the N900 screen size.

Archives of Wikipedia for many different languages are available. A few Wiktionary archives can be downloaded as well.  A demo archive with 999 articles is available under the name “small”.
Note: Most archives take up more than 100 mB of space on your MyDocs, make sure you have space.
As soon as you download the archive(s), you can search for any article from the main screen. Since all archives are stored locally, the search is very fast. Pick any article and it will be opened in your Web application, and easy to read, thanks to optimized view.

One and only problem I had with Evopedia is that most archives are downloaded via BitTorrent, which takes up a lot of system resources and sometimes can be very unresponsive. Maemo’s watchdog reboots the phone in such occasions and this sometimes messes up the file system. In case if you get a problem with MyDocs mounted read-only, run this as root and reboot the phone (don’t worry, you won’t lose any files):
  fsck.vfat -a /dev/mmcblk0p1
Apart from that, Evopedia provides a nice and easy way to read Wikipedia articles without having any internet connection whatsoever.

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Are you in need of special symbols while in X Terminal? Don’t want to bring up the special characters menu all the time? Well, here’s an easy way to customize the special characters  line on the bottom of your X Terminal window.
 
Open up your XTerm and use those commands to modify the characters line:
Note: Run these commands as a regular user, not root.
Modify the key labels:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels -t list –list-type=string “[keylabels]“
Replace keylabels with the set of labels you want to use, separated by colons without any whitespaces. You’re free to use any text, just don’t use labels too long. The maximum safe amount of labels you can use is 7, if you use more, they will all go to a side-menu.  For example, if we are to add pipe, input and tilde symbols you can use this:  Tab,Esc,PgUp,PgDn,|,>,~
Next, set the characters that those labels will correspond to:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys -t list –list-type=string “[character values]“
Replace character values with the corresponding values. You can look up which values respond to which characters by looking at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51 file (do it as a regular user, so you don’t modify it by accident)
If we follow the example for pipe, input and tilde characters, we shall use these values: Tab,Escape,Page_Up,Page_Down,bar,greater,asciitilde
Restart your X Terminal, so the fullscreen button goes where it should go and enjoy!