The more command that ships with the N900 is a very stripped-down version which does not even provide text search. Fortunately, you can install the program less from the repositories. Unfortunately though, it has problems interpreting the Return key when you use the N900's X Terminal. (It's no problem via an ssh connection, though.)
The fix, luckily, is rather simple: Just enterexport TERM=vt220
before using less.
For a couple of weeks, I've been using a Brodit car holder for my N900. It was quite an expensive investment: 59€ for the N900 holder which includes a charger (29€ without the charger) plus 21€ for the required car adapter.
But you get what you pay for. First of all, the N900 holder is manufactured very precisely; the N900 glides in and out very smoothly. Charging is done via an integrated Micro-USB plug. Apart from the nice crafting, the guys at Brodit really have invested some thinking into how the holder might be useful, and so it has two other very nice features: First, it can be rotated so that you can choose between portrait and landscape orientation while driving. Second, it allows to unfold the N900 so that you can use the hardware keyboard while the N900 is still in place within the holder. I really like that, since the Nokia Maps application with its crappy non-standard user interface does not allow to use a software keyboard.
Apart from the N900 part, the car part also is worth mentioning: Brodit has a nice system where you combine an adaptor for a specific mobile phone with an adaptor for a specific car. And in my case, I could choose between four or five different car adapters for my car (a Volkswagen Golf) that would allow to attach the N900 at various different places within my car. The only thing that Brodit's system is lacking would be a quick-change system that would allow to quickly exchange the N900 holder by another phone holder (e.g., an N95 holder for my girlfriend's mobile phone when she wants to drive my car). So all in all, Brodit seem to manufacture thousands of different phone adapters (mind you: they even support the N900...) and thousands of different car adapters, so you probably can pretty sure to find a suitable combination for your own car and phone[s].
The manufacturer's website is a brodit.se; I bought my adapter at the German brodit-shop.de (delivery was quick and flawless).
Apart from the preconfigured IM profiles offline, busy and available, you can define six other profiles for the built-in instant messenger, where you can specify for which of the IM and SIP profiles you want to have which status. For example, for my workplace I have one profile where I am online only via my SIP accounts and Google Talk, but not via other IM.
Prior to firmware PR1.2, you could only have three such user-defined profiles; now it's six. For me, even six was not enough.
I suspected that the profiles are stored somewhere in /home/user, so I changed one of my IM profiles by selecting a different online status for one of my SIP accounts in that profile, saved the changes, and looked at which configuration files got changed (command: ls -lat /home/user). Et voilà: The profiles are stored in /home/user/.osso/.rtcom-presence-ui.cfg.
Simply editing that file with a text editor (as a Unix freak, I used vim) and adding another profile did, however, not do the trick. Rather, the IM application would ignore my changes and instead overwrite my modified file soon after.
But I found out that the following procedure worked for me. Since we live in a sometimes absurd world where people are drawn into court just because other people were too lazy to think, here comes the obligatory warning and disclaimer: You do all this at your own risk. I can neither guarantee that it works, nor do I guarantee that it does not break your phone. You have been warned. If it looks too difficult to you, ask a friend—with just a small bit of Linux/Unix commandline knowledge, it's really easy to do.
I imagine that you will be able to add many more profiles this way; however I recommend adding only three. Otherwise, you will have to scroll down to reach the text field where you can specify your status message and select if others should be able to see your GPS position.
(This is only relevant to people in Munich/München who work or study at TUM and perhaps LMU, FH/HS, etc., so I post it in German.)
Nachdem ich all diesen Mist für EAP PAP gemacht habe, habe ich erfahren, dass das MWN durchaus andere Authentifizierungsmethoden neben EAP PAP anbietet – allerdings fuktionieren die nicht mit einer selbstgewählten ...@mytum.de-Adresse, sondern ausschließlich mit dieser kryptischen, vom LRZ vorgegebenen Adresse. Falls man die nicht kennt (Achtung, das war bei mir nicht dasselbe wie diese ellenlange Mytum-ID, die ich bei meiner Einstellung auf einem Zettel genannt bekommen habe), kann man sich einfach bei Mytum einloggen und sich in bei den Konto- oder Maileinstellungen diese LRZ-Kennung anzeigen lassen. Ich hatte es stattdessen mit meiner Mytum-Kennung versucht, und genau das geht idiotischerweise dann nur mit EAP PAP.
The file system layout of the N900 is arguably not the easiest when it comes to maintenance: The root directory / and a whole bunch of important directories (e.g., /usr/bin/ and /usr/lib/) are stored together on a fast flash memory chip which is, unfortunately, rather tiny with its 256 MByte capacity. When you add and add new software, especially from the extras-devel repository, it may easily happen that you don't have any free space left on that device.
While there are various ways how to free up disk space by moving the disk hogs, you may ask yourself what these may actually be. Here's how I do that:
rootsh, findutils-gnu and coreutils-gnu, if you haven't done yet.root shell.2009-04-15+12:14:52 600 612764 /bin/bash 1 2010-02-11+00:52:24 124 125124 /bin/less 1 2009-07-01+12:16:27 4 1167 /bin/tempfile 1 2009-08-24+14:20:35 4 4012 /bin/lsmod 1 2009-04-02+10:54:09 8 5364 /bin/devlocktool 1 2010-02-11+00:52:24 12 10500 /bin/lesskey 1 2010-02-11+00:52:24 8 5188 /bin/lessecho 1 2010-02-11+00:52:23 8 6947 /bin/lesspipe 1 2009-07-01+12:16:28 348 355592 /bin/busybox 1 2009-02-26+08:24:27 4 45 /etc/hildon-welcome.d/default.conf 1More precisely, the format is like this:
By now you should have found out candidate files for "optifying", as it is usually called.
When you connect the N900 to a PC in USB mass storage mode (USB MSC, UMS), it may happen that it will complain and tell you that it will let access the PC only the SDHC card (i.e., /media/mmc1), but not the N900's main memory (i.e., /home/user/MyDocs/). This can really get on your nerves, e.g., if you want to install Nokia Maps for offline use onto the N900.
The purported reason is that the system will not allow external accesses to that file system, as long as any process running on the N900 still uses that file system (e.g., by keeping a file handle open, or by having cd'ed into there). However, I found out that this is not quite true: When I ran lsof | grep /home/user/MyDocs as root, not a single process was shown, yet the PC was still denied access to the flash memory, so this cannot be the full story.
After doing some Googling (which was not enough) and doing some additional experimentation, I found the following unelegant but working solution:
Most of the time, I'm writing in German on my N900; but from time to time, I write English — e.g., right now — and Bulgarian, which is written in cyrillic letters. While it's not a big deal writing in English on a German QWERTZ keyboard, I needed some possibility to quickly switch between QWERTZ and ЙЦУКЕ (for some funny reason, I've always written Bulgarian texts with a Russian key layout — which comes in handy now that the N900 doesn't offer Bulgarian; although I'm sure it can't be a big deal to install the Bulgarian layout, I saw software packages for that). At the same time, I want the automatic word completion to work for German and English, but not Russian, since I never type anything Russian.
And here's how I do that:
I normally use the hardware keyboard. When I need to type something in Bulgarian, I simply close the lid, tap into the text area on screen so that the virtual keyboard pops up, and then have a Russian virtual keyboard. If not, I have to change it by tapping on the “≡” button that is located left to the Return button on the virtual keyboard (3rd from right in the button row right underneath the text display). Admittedly, this way I only get the cyrillic characters via the software keyboard, but then, I still do a lot of mistakes when typing on the Russian keyboard without seeing the layout.
Alright, in my recent post, I described the numerous little flaws of the N900.
While the N900's set of features is huge and beyond description, in this post I will describe some of the really cool and (at the time of this posting) unique features that set the N900 apart from other mobile phones.
Imagine you have a mobile phone on which you can install...
root (which you can do without doing any unsupported, warranty-violating or otherwise unpleasant jailbreaking!) and typing apt-get dist-upgrade (alright, you might use the graphical program manager as well...)scp data back and forth, build ssh port forwarding tunnelsscp data back and forth etc.chrooted Debian that can run Firefox/Iceweasel (slow) or even OpenOffice (slo-o-o-o-w-w-!)extras-testing needed for that).First of all I have to say that I definitely do recommend the N900, especially for Linux-affine geeks. Actually I wrote this post mostly from my N900 while sitting in an underground. No matter what I write here, I still have to assert that it's the best phone I'v ever laid my hands on, by an order of magnitude.
Nevertheless, it does have a number of flaws that are more or less minor ones for me, but which may be major to other people who consider buying one. Therefore, I wrote this post so that people who buy it won't be disappointed after they bought it.
A lot of homework to do here for Nokia!
If you ever owned a Palm and have used Datebook3, 4 or 5, you know what really useful features a good day planner offers. Nokia's builtin calendar is leagues away from that master class. At least, it is possible to install the GPE calendar and GPE to-do list; however, that software does not access the built-in's calendar and todo lists but keeps its own — not good if you already have entered a lot of things into thoese.
umount if no process is accessing the card)./home/user/MyDocs/); however, it even does this when lsof doesn't display any processes keeping handles on that part of the directory tree. Ehh?The following widely circulated flaws have been fixed by Nokia in the meanwhile and thus do not hold any longer after a firmware/system update:
ssh does work, (a) the N900's applications will tell the window manager on your PC to have them rendered fullscreen (the address book looks funny in 1920*1080px) and (b) you won't see the application's menu, which renders X forwarding more or less unusable for most cases.chrooted environment. :-(/ has only 256MB yet includes /usr), which makes porting software a bit more difficult than you'd think initially. Moreover, if you install software using apt-get install instead of the built-in application manager, then / will fill up quite quickly. So make sure you don't forget to run apt-get clean.As the following information only applies to German customers of O2, I will provide them in German.
If I have missed important aspects, I'll add them later. It thus may be that this text will slightly change.
Last update> 2010-06-09.