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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
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
To do
Interface Done
To do
Sync To do
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Re: SIMless N900 as "desktop" machine
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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:
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!
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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.
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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
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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?
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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
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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 Code:
#!/bin/sh 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. |
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