Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have obtained my first N900. I have spent about an hour with it thus far. I have a few questions for those with nothing better to do or those with hearts of gold:

Am I going to need to flash this thing to get it to do what I want? Meaning, is it going to fight me for root or bar me from readily accessing system resources and drivers?

If so, what firmware would you suggest? I am only coming across documentation from almost two years ago. Are there newer developments? (Yes, I know I have much reading to do and you aren't here to hold my hand. I answer questions in UNIX/BSD forums so be nice. I'm all over it)

I suppose I am asking what you guys do on your development N900s?

Also, what can't I do that I could do on a typical Linux system? I'm really in the dark with this platform. I don't know what Nokia has and has not toyed with. What are some key applications/tweaks you would suggest. Thus far, I've pretty much only installed some command line necessities.

Sincerely,

Abe

1. You don't need to flash it. Just install CSSU stable (or testing if you want to risk a reflash). Familiarize yourself with the cssu wiki page (including the strange hildon desktop problem)
2. What you can't do: aptitude gui isn't working (but command line yes), there are some apps that are not on n900. But you'll be happy, as there's Easy Debian, which will make you able run all the open source progs that are on Debian! (With LXDE too!)

Really? LXDE? I don't use it myself - but even still. Any other window managers/desktops attempted? I think Openbox might be nice but perhaps not the best with the cascading menu on such a small screen. I know LXDE isn't a resource hog on typcial hardware but does it show bloat on the N900?

Thanks for the help,

Abe

1. Bought it second hand? If so, flash it, so at least you know what condition your device was in, just before you crashed it while experimenting

2. Any info you'd possibly want about flashing, find it here
http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware

3. For learning books on linux, have a look at my signature for a download of ebooks.

4. LXDE is what Easy Debian ships with by default. Personally I dislike LXDE and always replace it immediately with Enlightenment, aka, E17. More on that over here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=66531

hey congrats

flash the device to pr1.3 use the international ver
install backup menu start the device with the keyboard open you can perform backups, boot to terminal, usb host mode.
cssu will give you the latest in community enhancements
enhanced busy box and bash
power kernel v49 is the latest kerenel for the device

it is very similar to debian distro ..you can find the maemo sdk in the tab above marked development. wikis are kept up to date use the power search on the right in liu of the forum search. debian ldxe is not installed by default ..it has been compiled to run via chroot on the device. Baktrax distro has also been compiled to run on device if that interests you oh and windows 3.1 lol

good luck and have fun

edit: faster app manger is good for installing programs, not for pr updates or cssu and you can also use apt from the command line if you prefer you will also need rootsh to get root access

edit2 also you may have to add extra testing and devel repositories for some of the above apps

This was the answer I was looking for. You are my "Maemo Hero", Mike. Thank you.

Regards,

Abe

With Easy Debian you can install gcc.
But beware: if you install too many pkgs at once, your N900 will crash
Best use apt-get! - synaptic is very cpu-hungry!

I've had my N900 for a year now, and haven't yet found the need to flash it even once. I've been using the convenient "rootsh" package to perform root actions; information about this package (and other issues involving root) can be found in the root access wiki page.

I've seen no real need to play with any of the modified kernels yet, nor have I found any desire to mess with the CSSU as yet. The stock Maemo environment is a full fledged, fully open Linux distribution; you can do plenty without changing a thing!

This... is actually a hard question to answer. Of course, the hardware limits you to some extent -- you've got to live within the means of the memory and processing power of the phone. But, so far as I've been able to tell, you can run pretty much whatever you want on the machine. (Of course, you have to compile it for the ARM architecture...)

This can be avoided by putting swap on a SD card and performing the IO Improvement Swappolube tweak.

First of all, I would recommend performing repartitioning, most preferably using GUI solution (via package Backupmenu, it's mass-storage read & write mode, and linux PC - be it true linuxbox, or any other just booted with linux liveCD). The earlier You do it, the less concern if You manage to break something.

If You're planning to be "serious" Easy Debian user (or want, for example, Chromium or LibreOffice running from Maemo, via Easy Debian), You should add 4th. partition - 3GB should be sufficient in most cases - that You will use as native partition for Debian chroot, instead of using image file on vfat (performance reasons). I would recommend using ext4 as it's filesystem (it adds kernel-power to list of installed packages before starting - alongside backupmenu - as stock kernel doesn't have ext4 support).

If You're power/advanced user of GNU/Linux overall (not afraid of modifying some things latter, mess using terminal etc), You may consider reformatting Your home (/dev/mmcblk0p2) to ext4, while, of course, also increasing it's size (in cost of MyDocs - aka /dev/mmcblk0p1 - partition, as it was while creating dedicated partition for ED). Consider this advice only, if You're knowledgeble, and understand how to modify boot scripts related to /home/ (to make them consider it ext4), or You can search & read wiki/forum threads with understanding (I learned about it by reading, decided to perform, got sure that I understand WTF, and it went flawlessly - before that, I had no idea how it works).

If You're planning to use swap on microSD (which is only possible sane approach, unless You like decreasing performance without any gain), You may consider resizing /dev/mmcblk0p3 (SWAP) partition, to something like 100MB - You won't use it at all, so it's only failsafe reserve. No need for it to occupy 768 MB.

Then, You can happily proceed to joyful and straightforward process of installing CSSU, kernel-power (if You haven't decided to use filesystem different than default ext3, that require having kernel-power before repartitioning), Easy Debian (remember to mount it's image file somewhere, and cp -a it's content to Your dedicated partition, then modify ED scripts to use it from partition, instead of filesystem image), and whatever package You feel fancy.

And, if You haven't started screaming and running after reading this - it's all quite well documented, logical and stable, so don't get confused by how complicated it sounds, written in short manner here in my post

/Estel