To me and probably most of us the n900 represents the ultimate in portable computing. It is more than a phone (in fact it is a lousy phone) it is a full on computer in your pocket. The likes of this product has not been repeated. While I will agree there are windows phones, that is phones that run windows as oppose phones that run windows phone, they all have appalling battery life and an interface that is not suited to form factor.

In my opinion you cannot really shoe horn a desktop interface into such a tiny package. This is not a strict generalisation as I use easy debian day to day when I have to do some 'real ****' on the go. (thank you Qole, I owe you over 100 epic beers. Next time you are in Scotland, just come and get 'em! (this invite is extended to all maemoians who have made significant contributions to the n900, you know who you are. If you are passing through scotland and need a floor to sleep on for the night...))

The n900 is my mobile computer. I never take a laptop anywhere as it is just too much bulk and commitment, however I often find when I am at where it is I was going and want to check my emails, fix digital photos and browse and stuff I WOULD like the comfort that comes with a full size keyboard and screen. There was a post a while ago by Geneven(?) who explored the issue. How can I use my n900 as desktop? I cannot remember the outcome of the discussion but I think it can be summed up with the following solutions:

1. TV out cable and bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
This requires you to carry:

• TV cable
• Mouse
• keyboard
• charger
• USB hub(?)

You also have to find a TV.

2. USB VGA adaptor and bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
This requires you to carry:

• VGA cable
• VGA adaptor
• Mouse
• keyboard
• charger

You also have to find a monitor.


Both of these require you to carry MOAR STUFF. This is the absolute antithesis of what a mobile computer should be. 'Chill out bros, we do not need any space. I have my mini mobile computer and THIS HUGE BAG OF CABLES AND ****.'

I have a suggestion, an aspect of the n900 that has not really been explored to deeply. I want to be able to plug my n900 into some stuff I can commonly find to get the big screen/keyboard etc AND not have to carry much more than just the n900.

One relatively unexplored idea is making the SD card as a bootable liveCD. It will allow you to simply use any computer at you disposal as the screen and keyboard. You will have full access to MyDocs, uSD and even /opt if you boot it from backup menu. Consider that the phone aspect of the n900 will still be available for you to make receive calls even when you have mydocs mounted as an external disc elsewhere. Of course the ULTIMATE would be to run the easy debian session on an external screen however I can not see how to do this without the huge pile of accessories required to connect to an external or a whole bunch of X over IP shenanigans that would be destined to fail.

I have already installed backtrack 5 to my SD card. This allows me to boot BT5 on other people computers from my phone to fix/hax/show off on the move. I am looking for a linux distro that fulfils the following requirements:

• Ability to 'copy to ram' i.e. copy to ram then boot (running from ram for teh mega lolz speed)
• Firefox (or perhaps opera) with flash player.
• Light window manager, preferably LXDE.
• The gimp.
• VLC
• All those non free codecs the freak stallman out
• A mail client
• Abiword, gnumeric, etc.
• Zip/rar/7zip etc etc support.

Any suggestions for a livecd that fulfills the above requirements?

Funny, I had nearly the same thoughts this week! With all these cables and IO devices the N900 just doesn't cut it if what you actually need is a laptop.

Two years ago my suggestion for a distribution would have been Slax:
http://www.slax.org/

Unfortunately Tomáš Matějíček is too busy right now to maintain that distro anymore and Slax is a typical one man show.
However, there's a similar distro (I think it started as a fork but I wasn't that active in the community at that time) called Porteus:
http://porteus.org/

I just started toying with this distro so I can't give you any detailed info yet. But afair all the concepts Slax users are familiar with should still be the same. I have the impression that Porteus is not quite as vivid as Slax used to be in its best time but as I said, I just started using Porteus...
edit: I just had a quick look and it seems like the Slax forum also deals with Porteus-related questions. So that might be why Porteus doesn't seem to be that active: The community is still over at Slax. /edit

To prevent knots in my brain I'll pretend both distros are the same (in fact what I'm going to say is valid for Slax):
- It's a squashed Live CD of 200MB (Porteus has 300MB) that has a script which allows it to do a frugal installation on a USB stick, HDD, whatever...
- A frugal install allows persistent changes or an unmodified system depending on a boot option.
- Software is usually provided in "modules". These modules are compressed archives that should bring all their dependencies and can be downloaded and (un)installed at any time. I was told it's much like how software installation on Mac OS works (since I hardly know Mac OS I can't judge that).
- These modules internally basically look like debian packages but without the DEBIAN directory.
edit: Slax modules should usually be compatible with Porteus. /edit

I don't think running Easy Debian the way you suggest would work well because it's an armel architecture. So to run it on another computer would either require that to be armel as well (which limits it to a few netbooks which are hardly faster than the N900 itself) or an emulator like qemu (which will most likely cost more performance than the underlying x86 system would add).
What should work is to mount the Easy Debian home directory into an x86 Debian system on your N900's SD card.If the x86 system has the same packages installed like Easy Debian you won't be able to tell the difference.
However, that approach has two flaws:
1. The SD card is very slow. I just installed a class 10 SDHC and I'm still stuck at 16MB/s (r) and 4MB (w) for sequential 1kB blocks. There are USB sticks out there that easily double these values.
2. Debian has no frugal installation option. In most cases the system should still boot on most computers but it's not quite as universal as Slax when it comes to detecting new hardware (e.g. another WLAN adapter).

bottom line:
Let's face it, the N900 as great as it is as a *nix tablet makes a poor USB stick just as it makes a poor phone. It's bulky and slow. Just get a regular fast USB stick for your OS! I have Slax on my USB stick for 4 years now and it works fine. Don't try to force everything into one device! Some things are better separated. I know what I'm talking about. I always have a swiss knife, a lighter, a flashlight, a USB stick and now my N900 with me.

I just installed Porteus on my ext2 formatted microsd card (fat will work too) and I can boot my netbook from it.
Of course once there is this USB cable between those two devices the next idea would be tethering. Unfortunately that brngs up two problems:

1. Afaik the N900 can't be run in mass storage mode and in PC suite mode at the same time. (If I'm wrong please tell me!) So after loading Porteus we need to disconnect the N900 and reconnect it in PC suite mode. To accomplish that I booted Porteus with the copy2ram parameter. Unfortunartely the changes* folder still needs the mass storage on the N900. So the only really safe method at first is to boot in fresh** mode. I think the changes folder issue could be addressed by copying it to a ramdisk and to mount that before disconnecting the N900. Of course at the end of the session one would have to write the changes back but that shouldn't be a problem.

2. For some reason Porteus doesn't get an IP address via the N900. ifconfig shows usb0 but dhcpcd says this:and dmesg says:I'm by no means a network expert so maybe I'm just missing something very basic. I've already blacklisted ipv6 and dmesg outputs this:So if anybody has suggestions I'd like to hear them! I'll also ask in the Slax forum for some help.


*) Slax/Porteus storage folder for persistent changes (works like an overlaying mount)
**) boot Slax/Porteus in its original configuration by not loading the changes folder

I got maybe an solution for a LiveLinux copied to ram with persistence on your N900 ...

On my phone I got my 16gb card vfat formated bootable with knoppix, acronis ti, systemrescuecd etc. with bootice, so I could boot an fully blown Debian with all my needs, backup other computers with acronis, kill viruses etc. ... on top of that I got portableapps with all that stuff I need in Windoze on the go (putty, winscp, firefox openoffice etc)

If you want I could help a little ...

sorry for my bad english

greetings, Claus

* I can also take phonecalls with my new toy

Thanks, why didnt i think of this, now i have made a 1.3GB partition of the last space on my 32GB MicroSD and put my Frost 10.10 LiveCD on there

Works just fine

god to help a little
But I think, such solutions belongs to external memory in case of bad things to the phone (more like a scotty beam me up device to control everything), or if you use the internal vfat partition for mediafiles thats active in use by the "host"-system - the N900 ...
If you use your phone in massmemory-mode, the internal vfat partition are afaik unmounted so no external ringtones etc can be used by the system ...
That was the case as I used it on my HTC TP a long time ...
That WinMo phone was an dumb usb stick ...

vi_, you probably have seen this, but, just in case you didn't:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81408

I think it's definitely worth interest and further investigation. Pi itself isn't big think to carry, and using freemangordon's proposed method, You can also export ED to any other linuxbox (even if started via liveCD/whatever) with USB port, *without* using Pi as intermedium.

/Estel

// Edit
I hope that during upcoming years, *good* DVI (or HDMI) micro-projectors (laser ones) will become much cheaper - they're irrationally expensive now - so, carrying Pi and little projector as addition, we'll be free from *any* monitor requirement.

Just off the top of my head - don't have time to check right now, but:
-docs for qtmobilehotspot says to connect n900 in no-mode for USB tethering
-in no-mode you can run mount-usb-mass-storage script manually, so... should be possible to do both?