First, lets have a look at its design:

Do you see that indicator on the front? Yes, that’s right… It’s a meter that shows the disk usage. The problem is that this meter must function in order for the flash drive to initialize and be readable to the operating system. Through some trial and major error, I found out it reads the first available FAT32 or NTFS partition. If one doesn’t exist, the flash drive simply keeps rebooting itself, rendering it completely unusable unless you can get it to create partition before it shuts itself down again. So if you plan on reformatting this drive, make sure you don’t delete partitions! Or, if you do, make sure you immediately create one afterwards.

Bad bad! Shame on you, Lexar…

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Personally, the most significant improvement is freeing up rootfs space and the responsiveness of the system. It’s become much more of the phone it was meant to be.

Nokia’s also update their Ovi store for the n900, so expect to see more 3D games like Zen bind and Jurassic roller coaster come out this Thursday.

I highly recommend you flash the ROM using the ROM images here: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/nokia_N900.php. I also suggest you flash the eMMC partition as well (MyDocs), thus doing a full hard reset. The two ROMs you want are…

RX-51_2009SE_10.2010.19-1.002_PR_COMBINED_002_ARM.bin (pick the one for your region)
RX-51_2009SE_10.2010.13-2.VANILLA_PR_EMMC_MR0_ARM.bin

Flash them in that order… the firmware comes first, then the eMMC flash. Must be done using the provided command line utilities!

If you can’t sacrifice your rig’s configuration, you can always use the App Manager to perform an Over-The-Air (OTA) update. It’s not as clean and you’re likely not to see too much of a performance difference, but does the job quickly & simply.

Enjoy your “new” phone! Stay tuned & I’ll show you how to overclock the n900 using a PR 1.2 compatible kernel.

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It’s called SSH Status and Switcher that allows you to toggle SSHD directly from the status area menu.

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So I recently acquired a Nokia N900 and wanted to SSH into it. With only 2.4GHz 802.11 support, utilizing the 5GHz band was not an option. But I decided to go ahead and try it anyways, since my previous phone (HTC Fuze / Touch Pro / Raphael), after some careful tweaking, would be able to connect to a “foreign” AP for a minute or two before being kicked off.

Guess what? Association works!

But there’s a slight tweak that’s required to be able to use the N900 for any services such as SSH. Normally, at home, I can connect the N900 to my 2.4GHz band and access it from another computer without any special tricks. But due to the bullcrap policy of prohibiting unauthorized APs, the “Power Saving” option for the wireless controller of the N900 needs to be disabled in order to use it for services. Solution #2 is to make an applet that runs a shell script invoking a ping command that pings any IP on the LAN. I used the gateway’s. Both of these keep the WLAN connection “active” and work some magic, probably with CTS/RTS protection.

I personally recommend the 2nd method as it is more secure and allows more control over the power management.

Here’s a “HowTo” for both solutions:

SOLUTION #1 – Disable Power Management
1.) Settings -> Internet connections -> Connections
2.) Select your WLAN’s profile and press “Edit”
3.) Press “Next” 3 times to get you to the end of the wizard.
4.) Press “Advanced”, then to the “Other” tab.
5.) Change “Power saving” to “Off”
6.) “Save”, “Finish”, “Done”, “Save”

SOLUTION #2 – Make a Ping XTerm Script
You must have root access to set this up or it won’t work. (Hint: Install the ‘rootsh’ package.)

Create the file /usr/share/applications/hildon/keepalive.desktop containing the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.1
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Name=KeepAlive
Exec=/usr/bin/osso-xterm 'sudo ping [RHOST]'
Icon=
#X-Window-Icon=timerwidget
X-Window-Icon=
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Change [RHOST] to whatever host you wish to use. This script will open up xterm and ping the specified host. A straight up execution of a ping will send the task to the background and you will need to then grep for the PID and kill it to stop execution. Running in xterm will give you a much easier way to stop the script.

Cheers.

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Blog posts will still be tweeted.

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Just an update / followup to my previous post about the M6400 – you should be able to use the M6500′s audio and touchpad drivers (they’re newer, for the same hardware).

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Wonderful piece, and well done. You can hear for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCEEeiGrAic

You can purchase the song ($0.99) or album ($9.99) here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002C77VP6/ref=sr_1_album_1_rd?ie=UTF8&child=B002C7ECHQ&qid=1261898438&sr=1-1

Enjoy!

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