I would like to write a "ScreenSaver" program that is activated whenever the N900 is idle and it is connected to the powercord. How should I do this? Should I just read the xscreensaver sources or won't whatever techinque it uses not work under FreeMantle?

My first application would be a photoalbum that would show pictures on the beatiful N900 screen, whenever the phone is idle.

Uhm, I'm no expert, but how about the CPU frequency trick? See, whenever the phone goes idle, the CPU downclocks itself to 250MHz. so in theory you can tell when the phone is idle by polling the frequency.

Sounds reasonable, in lack of anything better. How do you read the CPU frequency? /etc/cpuinfo?

1) it would end your battery twice faster?
2) are you trying to write an app or you want others to write for you (nothing personal - but it looks you don't know where to start man)

1. I wrote that I intend this application to run when the unit is connected to the power cord. Thus no problem with battery drain.

2. I intend to write the application with clutter, though I still haven't decided whether to do it in Python or C.

And yes, I know how to write applications, though there are a few points that I wanted help with, and asking stupid questions is one of the first principles of learning. And "man" I typically use for "man pages". Try "man man", man.

Cheers,
Dov

D-Bus signals are emitted by BME when the charger is connected/disconnected. To get the current state, look at the "maemo.charger.connection_status" property on the UDI "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/bme" using HAL*.

*/me wonders if gudev will build...