Hello fellow n900 owners! Its been very long since I came here, I am unaware of any current progress. My last foray was into CSSU . Now I have been using my N900 mainly as a media device i.e. mainly as an MP3 device in my home and in car.

As the title suggest I want to dedicate this unit totally to my car, not necessarily fixing it in the car but to mainly play music and if possible as a GPS device too. Is it possible to remove maemo and install linux or any other operating system which is fast and can handle the music? Is it possible to remotely control the N900 while in car? I know VNC can do this but I think we need a wifi network for it.
Also I have Sygic but is there any other Offline maps application that is better and fast?
Basically I am open to any suggestions as to how to use it as in-car system!!
I searched but did not find any thread,If there is already a thread like this please link me to it!
Thanks!

My main reason to use this in car is because I CANNOT part with my N900 though I am not using it, it has become a very valuable friend

Look for Modrana project for your replacement navigation service.

I don't see why your "device is not fast".
Sound like you should reflash and clean out.
Then setup your desktop for your usage.

You can use bluetooth to stream and control music.

The car stereo I use has automatic bluetooth connection. Whenever I switch my car on it connects automatically. I'm also able to skip to the next/previous song and pause and play with the stereo.

As for navigation modrana is alot faster then sygic, but doens't have the looks. Sygic works just fine for me and fast enough. You could just reflash the device and only install modrana. Or overclock it a bit too 900MHZ if you think it's still too slow.

Open Media Player will stream music over the FM transmitter to your car radio and it has a pretty good "Car Mode" with large readable text and controls.
Start the FM transmitter on the N900 first then do a search with your radio and it should lock to the same freq as the N900. Then start Open Media Player and and play your music.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I am currently using the transmitter setup in my car as i do not have bluetooth. I am looking into the modrana project. I usually use my android phone for GPS, hence I wanted to know if there was a way to control the music player on N900 from my android.

I use my N900 like that every time I'm in the car.

Modrana up for navigation, FM Carkit activated to turn on Fm transmitter for music (& route calls hands-free through the radio), music played through either OMP or Symphonie (Symphonie will shuffle in 1 folder).

The phone holder is mounted barely overlapping the right edge of the windshield mirror, so I can keep one eye on the road if I need to operate the N900.

There may be some N900-specific gooseneck suction cup holders on eBay; I got a new case from there recently.

Also QTLockscreen makes the system work, since it lets you wake up the screen when the top & side buttons are made inaccessible in the car holder.

change your car stereo to one that supports BT
i bought a simple Sony BT enabled car stereo some years back for less than USD200 (they fixed it into my car for me too).
you'd still b able to use it later even if you change to (gasp!) iphone or android phones.
no mechanical parts, no wear & tear, lower audio loss (lower compared to CD quality but almost there), all make BT A2DP audio quite decent.
it also works as my car hands free. no need to wear and charge an additional BT hands free gadget (which we typically really only need while driving), and no clumsy wires too.

as for remote control, can be achieved using BT PAN profile. i once made my n900 connect to my friend's n900 over BT PAN. could ssh, etc. might require remote X if you want GUI.

BT can be kept alive the whole day, not too much batt issues. however, keeping BT PAN connected or BT A2DP music playing will consume a bit of batt (much lower than wifi still i guess).

also, there may b some lag when using PAN & A2DP simultaneously.

all the above achievable if you're willing to mess wth your n900 jst a bit

Yup. While not exactly mounted in a car, while i'm hitting the trails on my mtb, omp in car mode and modrana are by far the best solution i have found.

Its really useful to download maps of ~50m (or km's for logical units of mesurement, but hey im a merican' :P ), when you use a prepaid tmobile service, and once you get out in certain places theres no service at all anyway. Just a bit of wifi downloading 30 before my ride and im set.

OMP, just recently downloaded, and havent used the stock media player since. Faster, more features, the car view is just awesome for biking whether for transit or fun/exercise, and if you want to shuffle your entire library (8000+ and growing in my case, 64GB sdxc microsd, 32ish GB onboard, really the only data i have on my n900 save for app data, modrana maps, and the odd tv videos i put on there), it just requires making a playlist, though it takes a good amount of time, in my case ~1hr to process.

Then the icing on the cake, was when i clicked a normally choppy flash video one night in the stock browser, and OMP popped up, streamed it flawlessly with no seek issues as i find alot of other streaming video attempts fail in on my n900. Prettty frickin sweet compared to inbrowser flash.

Just have to switch windows from modrana/omp, prob an easier way to do that than the stock method too, havent looked into it yet. Not super duper lazy, but i reserve the right to do so lol.

And forget BT, hardwire it into a phono input if you can, BT is decent, but audio quality suffers if you listen to anything above 128kbt mb3's. If you really want BT, get a decent reciever, i've been mulling over one of these bad boy's recently, looks like a very high quality board. Just have to do a bit of diy wiring, and put it in a project box of some sort to get it setup. I dig you can choose a li-ion battery of your mah preference, and it has a built in charger. Only $40 too.

The diy junkies dream lol, i'm holding off til the other handful of projects i'm working on are completed though. I'd wager its a far cry better than the meeelectronics airfi af1 i have though. And you can use an external dac, since in reciever mode (one board, can work as either a transmitter/reciever/multitude of functions/options, pretty configurable) it can kick out 48khz from a digital input (prettty sure wireless BT would fit that bill, but n900's ceiling is prob going to limit that to 44.1khz).

Still, future proof with usb 3.0, aptx support, highly configurable, and the price is incredible for what you can do with that board, a bit of soldering, and diy work. If we ever figure out how to get a bt transmitter via usb working w/ the n900, and can do aptx 48khz, by god it would be magnificent. Or for future devices/current devices that can do that right now. Analog wired would take a back seat as far as the quality advantage in most cases.

http://www.kcwirefree.com/audio.html

The one i'm describing-

http://www.kcwirefree.com/kc6112.html

It would make good use of my broken n810's 1500mah lipo, very good use indeed

Maybe MeeGo IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment)?
It supposed to work with N900 and looks like nice useful system for in car application.