New N900 user - please help
 

I got my first N900 today!

I'm a little late to the party, I know, but I'm a Neo900 backer and I wanted to get used to the form factor and get familiar with maemo.

It seems that I've chosen a really awkward time to start! I received my phone today from ebay, and it's in good condition. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have the USB charging issue I've read so much about.

Unfortunately, the previous owner didn't flash it back to factory settings before selling it (seriously, it's making me a bit uncomfortable, there's loads of personal info on it!).

I have read the Wiki page on flashing but unfortunately all of the links to the firmware are broken, so I can't download "flasher" or the firmware itself. I am guessing this has something to do with the Ovi store closing?

My two most important questions are:

1. I noticed that 0xffff is in the Ubuntu repositories, can I use that instead of "flasher"?
2. Does anyone know where I can get a trusted copy of Maemo 5 PR 1.3, preferably the UK variant (what's the difference anyway?).

Many thanks in advance!

Sam

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

Here you go:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131117...g/tablets-dev/

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

Brilliant! Thank you :)

I've never used archive.org before, I'll have to remember it!

I'm still interested to know if anyone has used 0xffff before? Or any other tool like dd?

Any other tips for a new user? I'm going to install CSSU, but apart from that I don't really know what to do after flashing.

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

There's a very good wiki page with a number of suggestions for how to set up a new N900, called N900: The Perfect Setup. Give it a look! :)

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

I have such a love hate relationship with Linux! Here are my experiences trying to install flasher and flash the N900 on Ubuntu 14.10 in case they're useful to other noobs:

I did two things wrong here. First, I used the wrong version of flasher, which gave this error message:

After some searching on the forum, I unpacked the .tar.gz file for the correct version of flasher (3.5) and tried to run the binary with ./flasher-3.5 but BASH was giving this unhelpful error:

This happened becuase i'm on a 64 bit machine. Googling will probably tell you to install ia32-libs, but this doesn't work on newer versions of Debian/Ubuntu. These two commands worked for me:

I then:

• Flashed eMMC
• Flashed rootFS

...everything appears to be working!

Thank you both for your help today, that article had lots of interesting stuff in it.

CSSU tomorrow, then I'll go exploring!

Sam

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

If you want tou use it to organise your life to any extent, instal Qalendar; it uses the same backend as the stock Calendar app, but is much more flexible in terms of alarms, repeating events and so on.

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

Hi and welcome Feathers McGraw!

As Copernicus suggested, you should read that thread; and every thread in connection with your question. Search through this site, or google.

Second, I would suggest you to decide what you want to use your device for. There are tons of applications so you have to find those that fit your needs. I recommend reading first, install after that.

You can install easy debian, easy ubuntu if you would like to expand the boundaries (overclocking is strongly recommended to this, so be careful).

You can make a pentest device.

You can use it for drawing.

Etc. It is up to you.

For me, if I face something that I would do with my device, I almost always find a solution for that. And there are things/solutions that I even cannot imagine that can be done, but since it is open source... there are no boundaries :)

Oh, and one more thing: if you would like to use n900 on a daily basis and do "geeky" things, you should love Linux rather than hate... :D

Cheers,

jm

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

Just a reply to make people aware that there is a nice thread regarding the flasher and firmware files:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...9&postcount=13

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

Welcome. And kudos for figuring out how to use the 32-bit flasher!

You won't have any problems with the N900 nor with the Neo900 when it's ready :)

Re: New N900 user - please help
 

@TomJ, I'll check out Qalendar, sounds great. Hopefully I can sync it with ownCloud :)

@justmemory, I'm using it as a daily phone, which is what I'll be doing with the Neo900 too - battery life actually isn't as terrible as I had expected it to be (it lasts all day for me) but that's probably because 3g is off and I haven't synced it with loads of services.

I just wanted a phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard for remote server administration (trying to type linux commands on a touch screen is just awful, even with something like Hacker's Keyboard on Android), and the flexibility I've come to enjoy on my laptop/servers/router.

Easy debian/ubuntu is something I'd definitely like to try (I saw a video of someone running XFE or LXDE on youtube, was shocked it was even possible with 256MB RAM!), I'm expecting it to get much more useful on the Neo900. Just think how many people on Android are stuck using rubbish office programs - Libreoffice would be awesome :D

To answer my own question about 0xffff, it seems you can flash the root FS but not eMMC with it. If this is out of date information, please correct me - I'd prefer to use an open source tool in future.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...=0xffff&page=6

Sam