Hey there,

after my roommate donated his fubared N900 for whatever useful thing I can come up with, I decided upon making a XBMC-like, web-controlled, mplayer-based media center / rsync backup solution for our living room.

As this will be an ad-hoc solution, I need help with removing unneeded modules and packages related with voice and data and microsd (as that hardware is physically broken and slows down the device boot times and responsiveness significantly). Also I need to remove all communication functionality including SMS, emails, call app and so on. This will be used only for mplayer and possibly web. I'd like to strip as much as I can, still sanely (only if it is a performance benefit), while retaining media (audio,video,codecs), networking+wifi and tv-out functionality. As I don't have a good enough understanding of Maemo I'll need help with those (hence posting in this section).

-- OFF-TOPIC INFO --
Currently I have an up-to-date CSSU-thumb installation with some speed optimizations and overclocking. I plan on using a light HTTP server for the web-control part, or even coding my own. I will also set up a modified USB-hub for use with host mode *while* charging, connected to an external drive, and possibly a LAN card. When finished, I will release a package (stripping down the OS is only needed in my scenario and not a prerequisite at all).

Thanks in advance!

Why mplayer only? Many video types could be played with hardware acceleration, giving performance boost, through mafw. I would keep mplayer (CPU decoding, only) for things that won't work with mafw.

Considering, that your decoding performance (using mplayer) depends solely on CPU power, I would consider overclocking upper limit to insane things like 1150 mhz - as you said, device is quite dead already, so risk of problems in 3+ years isn't important, "methinks". Just don't *lock* it at 1150 mhz - limits like 500mhz-1150mhz should give quick enough reaction time, with super-power allocated, when required.

Also, remember, that you need to disable smartreflex, as it works only up to 900 mhz (in case of kernel-power, otherwise it's broken, totally), but it shouldn't matter, as your device is going to be powered from charger 100% of time.

As for stripping unnecessary components, without losing basic functionality, you should attract attention of user reinob - AFAIK, he went further than anyone else, in stripping components.

/Estel

I thought mplayer was *THE* holy grail of hw-accelerated media playback... stupid me! MAFW looks nice, but I was looking for an already built player to wrap a web API around and mplayer seemed like a nice candidate (lots of file and stream formats support).

after stripping down the OS if there is enough rootfs available, consider disabling ubifs compression. AFAIK nobody has done it yet and there is speculation that it may increase performance

Attention attracted

However I have not gone so far as to remove basic phone functionality (SMS, dialer, etc.), so what I've done with my spare N900 may not be so relevant. And I didn't document it anyway

My advice would be to go through the Maemo boot process (and this I did briefly document here) and disable any services that are not required (common sense may be useful here . Then test if the N900 still boots OK, and if so try to remove the package owning the disabled service.

The problem with Maemo, as well as with almost any modern Linux, is the whole dependency mess. It can happen that if you attempt to apt-remove, say, the calendar, you will be forced to also remove xorg-xserver, or other non-sensical situations.

For that the only fix is, if you know what you're doing, to edit the package information (alter the dependencies) so that you can still remove a package without breaking the whole, fragile, mess that any apt-based system is.

Another (brutal) option would be to remove the whole apt/dpkg infrastructure, so that you are free (and forced to add/delete files by yourself. This will give you much more control, but may be a bit overkill.

Anyway: the best way of having an N900 without all the unnecessary Maemo "bloat" (depending on the intended purpose, obviously) is to replace it with Arch Linux or some other Linux distribution. I think this is what I will do with my spare-spare.

Thanks for dropping by, I currently managed to remove all call, SMS, address book, calendar etc... functionality. Still some more crap to remove and also haven't delved into disabling the voice/data modules in the kernel. Also when trying to remove unnecessary l10n packages, apt tries to put down ~80mb worth of system stuff...

edit: About Arch - I've been considering it, but am not sure about the tv-out and gpu-acceleration capability. Also heard ALARM was a bit unstable. Also... I want to package the media center for Maemo


I am interested in this and will look it up when I've cleaned up the OS, thanks for pointing it out.


Every 30 minutes I am doing a full backup with backupmenu, so borking the installation won't take more than 5 minutes to fix.

Will post a diff of installed dpkg -l between my stripped setup and clean PR1.3, and the backups if someone wants to play with the installation (you need kp51 + Boot Menu + backupmenu before restoring).