Hello.

First, this phone is awesome. It does everything I want even playing high quality videos.

My plan is to develop apps for it, but to be honest, its just a pain to keep booting my desktop up cos I need to type a big document.

So, my plan is to use my N900 as a desktop PC for surfing the web, downloading stuff and developing apps for it.

Now, to achieve that, I was thinking of the following:

1. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse
2. Audio to my speakers via bluetooth
3. Use something wirelessly such as DLNA or maybe display over WIFI to my monitor.

What do you guys thing? Has anyone done this? I though I would ask first before I start to shell out for random keyboards and mouses until find the one that works!!

Thanks guys.

the strangest thing is the monitor.

the rest has been talked a lot in the forum.

i like the su-8w keyboard, but its quite expensive here in Argentina
about mouse, IDK

A much simpler way to set up a monitor would be to use the video out cable that came with the n900 on a tv. At least thats how i'd do it... but then again i'm lazy

If you can achieve >640x480 video out resolution, wouldn't you want a windowed environment to take advantage of the extra space?

Or are you not running Maemo on the n900?

Thanks for the replies...

Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are expensive! But its the price you pay I suppose!

The problem with the cable is that you are wearing out the socket, especially how much I would be using it. Hence a wireless solution would be better.

In terms of video playback, I could always use a media centre and simply load the hi-def video on that.... but ideally I would want to play it directly off the N900.

As for using it as a PC, I have noticed maemo does get a little slow when you have loads of windows open. So I think that could be a limitation of maemo...

So the next step would be to maybe wipe it and put my own linux distibution on it... Something like LFS (Linux From Scratch).

That way, I think I could eek out more from the hardware... What do you think?

I could then take that one step forward and write a driver based on the current driver and output via Wifi. Then all I need is a Wifi monitor and job done????

Has anyone done this? (using it as a main PC?)

Thanks.

Lets not forget, the N900 has only 256MB RAM. I have never seen Linux run on 256MB and not slow down with only a few applications open, even cut-down windowing environments eat memory. The slow down is likely to be once it starts having to use SWAP memory, as even flat out the eMMC seems to be limited to around 15-20MB/s, far slower than a HDD. For small random writes its even worse as it will quickly be clogging up the CPU with IO Waits.

I think using this hardware as a PC replacement is asking an aweful lot of it. I love my N900, but there is no way I could put up with using it as a PC myself.

As for Linux from Scratch, I'm not sure if its even possible as the core drivers of the N900 are not open-source. Perhaps if you used the Maemo kernel you could, but then what is the point? You almost certainly would be throwing away the phone functionality as if it was THAT easy to get working then Maemo 5 would have been far more feature complete. Overall, Maemo seems pretty stripped down as it is. What exactly were you thinking you could remove to make it leaner? (although it has been suggested moving/adding SWAP to SD might help if you use a lot of optified applications as they will be vying for access to the same flash chip)

http://www.lindy.co.uk/80211g-wirele...ver/32499.html

Wireless VGA sender - probably requires specific software on your PC to work though, so I don't know how you would get it done on an N900...

Having just a reliable bluetooth connection for keyboard and mouse would be very, very useful.

I don't think there is a "standard" bluetooth install on the n900 so connecting bluetooth devices can sometimes be tricky.

The tv-out option was one of the reasons I bought the n900.

Ok - It will never be a PC in-terms of a laptop of desktop but as pocket computer I don't think it's beyond functioning close to this.

I pretty much use it as my desktop computer. All my social webbing is done from inside the n900. The only things that i am not able to do is getting a pretty heavy webgame running smoth.

The n900 would be complete if it had sun-java6 and wine.

Aren't bulemaemo making bluetooth mouse and keyboard possible on the n900? A lot can be done through ssh and x2x.. but that would need the desktop computer running.

Hello.

Sorry for the late reply, work has been very busy!

Thank you for your replies.

Alex Atkin UK: to be honest, most of what I do is so basic, like youtube, web surfing and watching a few movies, that it seems a bit unnecessary to use my desktop for that. Hence the reason why the N900 is perfect as a computer replacement for me!

I think your right about maemo being pretty stripped. I think the slowdown is more to do with bugs in the processes (Conky is a great tool for finding buddy processes). So in time, I think N900 will run at peak performance.

JohnLF: Thanks for the link, a bit pricey though, but then again I assumed it wouldn't be cheap!

AlMehdi: Have not heard of Bluemaemo but will definitely check it out... thanks!

So far, bluetooth keyboards and mouse I have found are expensive.... heres to continuing googling!