There is a clear LGPL notice in the package, so let's give them the benefit of a doubt it's just a packaging error - I have written to the maintainer address about the issue.

Really? I would certainly hope so... But since there is the IMEI limitation, I doubt it will be actually opensource, because that would allow anyone to just remove the check and repackage it... I'm not sure I understand the reasoning for that check... All the information is in chinese, so its just what I gathered from google translation. Maybe some chinese speaker could shed some light on this? amandalam?

My chinese is not that good but I would love for penpower to work on my phone. Having a look through this link is appears that you can patch it so that you add your own imei to penpower thus allowing it to work.
For anyone with better chinese than me, is what I am saying correct?
http://forum.tgbus.com/viewthread.php?tid=1052433

So I won't void the warrenty on my body, if I do drugs? Cool. (Well, not really, actually)

Was there an option for english language? and i love how they tried making the phone look skinnier in the video lol

ye the drugs is a poor analogy but I thought the same thing when I read the case about the hot coffee debate, "Spend hours hacking the game like so, and you see some poor porno acts...Disgusting!"

Personally I agree with the voids warranty etc but surely you could actually sell a radio transmitter with an off button and then say it voids warranty if you switch it on? My point is that is there maybe a legal loophole that could be used against Nokia? I only bring it up because I dont want them going under or anything else we'll never see Pr1.2...

Im sure they have lawyers that sort this kind of thing out though

It does look so (judging just from the screenshots...), but this is still a pretty crappy way of getting it. I might try it when I get some time. Although I've bumped into a few bugs with that package already (like I was unable to switch to another scim method after I switched to Chinese Pad one) which make it pretty much unusable for me. (and its hard to update if you "patch" it like that)

if you press that red icon to the left it allows you to change between different methods. the only thing i miss with the mscim method is the sym button for various symbols.
i will experiment with the patch tonight...

That's a good find! You're absolutely right, the patch allows your IMEI to be usable by Penpower.

Here's a translation by myself if anyone is having difficulty following w/o knowing Chinese.

1. This step is basically telling those who already has Chinese localization in their N900 to uninstall it by first changing the system language to English.

2. In App Manager, search and download mscim-n900-ppinputmethod. (I believe as of now it's only available in extras-devel, and so the usual warning applies)

3. Download the patch provided by the link (NOTE: I've tried downloading but apparently you need to be a member of the forum with at least '5 forum currency'...) Extract the files on to desktop.

4. Upload the 4 extracted files into "usr/lib/scim-1.0/1.4.0/Helper" in your N900 and replace the existing ones. The example uses WinSCP, but I'm sure you can use other method such as SSH.

5. Get your IMEI number (i.e Settings > About)

6. Open X-Terminal enter these commands:
sudo gainroot [press enter]
sed -i"s/033336155/xxx/g" /usr/share/scim/pphwrwp/database/libpprecog.so [press enter]

Where xxx is the last 9 digit of your IMEI.

7. When all is successful with no errors, restart N900. Then you can change the system language to Chinese Traditional HK, Chinese Traditional TW, or Chinese Simplified PRC, and then enable the MSCIM input methods. Here's the settings for the MSCIM in their order:

- Activate GooglePinyin
- Activate Zhuyin
- Activate Pinyin
- Activate Handwriting
- Activate Cangjie

8. To uninstall everything, change the system language to English and uninstall "mscim-n900-ppinputmethod" and "n900-locales-ppchinese" via App Manager.



Hopefully this is helpful for those who want to experiment. As stated I'm unable to download the patch. I'll try to sign up for the forum tonight after work and see if I can download it and test out this badass penpower input.

Edit: The author of that post had a small review of Penpower. Basically he said that it's still full of bugs. For instance, when you are typing Chinese, if you don't close out of the input window, the input window will stay on the screen. He also specified that the Penpower app takes a lot of rootfs space. According to him, it's about 40mb. I guess I'll have to free up my root before attempting this out.

still kills the Fn-Sym virtual keypad...