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.