maemo.org - Talk - SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

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- - SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=93377)

SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

I have an N900 which lost its ability to talk to SIMs, which has mostly been gathering dust since firing all its data into a brand new (OK, second hand from ebay) replacement. Digging up a composite to SCART adapter and BT keyboard and mouse has opened up the possibility of it sitting permanently plugged into the telly, doing useful stuff. This thread will act as my log of what I've done, and what I'd like to do, to that end.

I'll make new posts as and when something works, linking to appropriate posts in other threads and/or wiki pages as appropriate, and possibly update this first post. When it seems useful to do so, I'll wikify the lot, as having stuff in one place in t'wiki is a Good Thing; searching through acres of tmo posts gets confusing. This is therefore going to be a long post, so I'll try and structure it to avoid wall-of-text syndrome.

I'd appreciate people's thoughts and comments on what I've done and am doing, and all suggestions on what I'd like to do very welcome.

So,

The Setup

1 N900 with no SIM access but otherwise perfectly fine, KP52 and CSSU Thumb installed.
1 Samsung 40" TV with SCART and USB ports.
1 Wireless Entertainment Keyboard 8000 bluetooth keyboard and mouse set.

Big Screen Appropriate Software

Easy Debian, obv. Estel's image, with maemo desktop icons for Chromium and the LibreOffice apps. I may end up mostly in LDXE, but not yet.

Performance

Done

Stop the bloody annoying "All telephony disabled" message using peterleinchen's useful tip. I think this stops the Cellular Services Daemon starting, which means more system resources are available; it certainly felt like the whole system was snappier.
Convert /home to ext4, grow it, and move EasyDebian there in a directory, like so. When I have the time to do this to my pocket N900 I will do so and fine tune the instructions there, then make it into a proper wiki page, as well as updating the repartitioning page with the gen I discovered in the process.

To do

Find an appropriate overclock level. The device is constantly plugged in, so the battery is constantly charging which I think has a tendency to heat it up. On the other hand, it'll never be in a pocket, so can cool. I tried a max freq of 900, and it felt warmer than I expected after a few hours. I've dialled it back to 720. Trial and error needed.
Find appropriate swappiness etc settings. It's currently on the swappolube recommended ones. I read on a swappiness thread that it was set to 100 by default to allow speedy gain of RAM by the phone on an incoming call. Given that it won't be receiving GSM calls, less of an issue. More research and experimentation needed.
Get swap on SD working with FlopSwap. I'm currently having problems with this, but sixwheeledbeast is being very helpful via PM, so this will hopefully be solved soon.
Get the Easy Debian chroot scripts set up properly to stop ED accessing maemo's /home but allow it to share MyDocs. I don't think I'm there yet.

Interface
Done

Get the mouse and keyboard working. I needed kirrillkk's fix to get the combo keyboard working acceptably.

To do

The BT keyboard has loads of extraneous buttons. It would be good to:
- Map the keyboard volume buttons to the N900 ones, allowing modification of font size in xterm and, y'know, volume control.
- Find a way to get the power button menu up from the BT keyboard.
It would be nice to easily disable TV-out when not needed; sure the device is plugged in, but we don't want it burning cycles for no gain. I wonder if a script that toggles it on when the BT mouse or keyboard is attached and disables it it when the last one of them disconnects could be crafted?
Acquire Y-cable and see what peripherals could be used: printer, scanner, whatever.
Not directly maemo related, but I wish I could persuade the TV to turn on at a set time with the ext input rather than the aerial. If I did, I'd want use Alarmed to display one of my maemo homescreens at the same time, with my Calendar Home and OMWeather widgets. I might even instruct it to get OMP streaming Radio4 or 6 Music.

Sync

To do

Of course, that last would require a decent sync of items in Calendar solution to be useful.
There are also perfectly good file backup solutions available, one of which I'll implement in due course, he says dangling a hostage to fate.

Random to do, from my thoughts over here

Find a way to use Skype or other video chat service via TV out. When I tried, the tv-out dropped the phone-ui and instead displayed the output of the front camera, massively blown up to full screen.
I'm moving soon, and if the TV is appropriately placed in the new flat, getting the N900 to act as a security system would be pretty cool.

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomJ (Post 1430769)

It would be nice to easily disable TV-out when not needed; sure the device is plugged in, but we don't want it burning cycles for no gain. I wonder if a script that toggles it on when the BT mouse or keyboard is attached and disables it it when the last one of them disconnects could be crafted?

I had originally considered charging the phone from the TV's USB port, but that resulted in some nasty noise from the TV when displaying the N900's output; some sort of interference with the audio line for some reason. Then I remembered that about 5 years ago I had acquired an energy saving plug that was being given away by a newspaper in conjunction with a power company; it's designed to kill power to peripherals (monitor, printer etc for PB, DVD player or similar for TV) when the main device powers down. With the N900 charging from that, a script detecting charger state could toggle not only TV-Out, but also bluetooth and until I come up with a reason for it to be online all the time, wi-fi.

The downside is it wouldn't be being charged the whole time and if I were away for a while might die entirely, which would be annoying when I came back and had to fiddle with chargers. This could be mitigated by having the script toggling starving profiles to extend battery life. I could also program the telly to come on for an hour or so every couple of days. Whether this would outweigh other powersaving measures is left as an exercise for the student. Of course, the really swish solution would have the battery reaching 5% trigger an IR command to power up the telly and to turn it off again when it reached a reasonable charge... This would depend on the feasibility of having the N900 permanently positioned such that the telly's remote receiver could see the the N900's IR transmitter,

Quote:

Not directly maemo related, but I wish I could persuade the TV to turn on at a set time with the ext input rather than the aerial. If I did, I'd want use Alarmed to display one of my maemo homescreens at the same time, with my Calendar Home and OMWeather widgets. I might even instruct it to get OMP streaming Radio4 or 6 Music.

Thinking about it, if the telly turned on tuned to the same station as OMP, two presses of the remote source button would bring up that "Today" screen. Thinking further, why not have the N900 do that? (see caveat in last sentence of my previous paragraph).

Sorry for rambling on, but explaining this for other helps me work out the ideas.

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

TomJ, why use (usually crappy) bt kb&mouse, when you can use normal ones? Since your N900 is stationary anyway, I recommend combining it with a powered usb hub and any usb kb, mouse, or combo of those, hdd(s), even printer or ethernet adapter - (almost) everything is possible!

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

You may be able to set the channel your TV switches on using the (usually undocumented) "Hotel mode". For our TV we have to push a button on the TV and another on the remote at the same time when switching on, or something, but then we can set the default channel and other stuff.

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

Thanks for the feedback Flashinthenight86 and Xagoln. The main reason for using BT is that the comfortable viewing position for the low res provided by the TV out on a 40" screen is several feet away; the TV is currently in the bedroom of the place I share, so BT allows me to use it in bed, and will be in the living/dining-room of the flat I will hopefully soon move into, where it'll be used from the couch or dining table. This means that in an ideal world I'd like to be able to simply turn on the TV with the remote, pick up the kb sat next to it and crack on. Plus, I don't yet have a powered hub!

If other people find this useful, they can of course use wired input.

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xagoln (Post 1430799)

Hmm, interesting. This gives details of how to get into hotel mode for my TV. I will have to look into the options. I suppose I shouldn't be surpised at tmo-ers knowing how to hack other devices!

EDIT: Yep, I can over-ride the turn on channel selected in the TV's standard menu. Good gen!

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

I don't want to start a new thread for a related question... I would like to use 2x (wireless) gamepads at the same time with my n900, for playing cps2 games. What problems may I face?

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

Wireless as in 2,4 GHz through hostmode, or 2x bluetooth?

Anyway, it all depends how the device is recognized. If it's acting like HID keyboard, you will have problems (as each device will send same keyboard event on pressing same button). same for HID mouse, afaik.

If it's registered as SDL joystick, you shouldn't have problems. Anyway, it's exactly the same as with desktop GNU/linux distro.

Cheers,

Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomJ (Post 1430790)

I've not progressed much with this for reasons various - getting interviewed for new job, looking into moving to area of new job, sorting out paperwork for same, USB port coming out of SIMless phone. The last might seem to make this next post seem like nugatory effort, but I hope to get access to an SMT soldering station at new job (there is a sensor lab in the building I'll be working in, which you'd have thought would have the necessary kit), so will attempt to fit a micro AB port. In the meantime, I can test on my everyday N900.

Searching tmo and the wiki, I reckon the best way to do this is Dbus-Scripts. From http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...48&postcount=1, the way to monitor for charging is:

Code:

SCRIPT * * com.nokia.bme.signal charger_connected

where SCRIPT is the path to this script:

Code:

#!/bin/sh



#Check if TV out is attached:

video_cable=$(lshal | grep 'line-out.*video-out')



if [[ "$video_cable" != "" ]]; then



#Switch to "Today Screen" of desktop

gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/hildon-desktop/views/current -t int 1



#Fire up Bluetooth

run-standalone.sh dbus-send --system --type=method_call --dest=org.bluez $(dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.bluez / org.bluez.Manager.DefaultAdapter | awk -F'"' '/at/ {print $2}') org.bluez.Adapter.SetProperty string:Powered variant:boolean:true

fi

As I am currently not using a dedicated device for the TV, I only want this to run if the video out's plugged in, so pinched the check from http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...4&postcount=27

The BT on part has the auto-detect adapter command from http://wiki.maemo.org/Phone_control#Enable so anyone can use it unmodified; a little work needed to tailor to your own device and save it a little work each time it's run.