Nokia N900

 

There is no guarantee you will not lose your data when trying to play with the device. Think backup!. I have already lost my device (locked on the second flashing point at reboot).

In November 2009, I ordered a Nokia N900. After playing with the N770 (more a prototype than anything else), I bought its successor, the N810, 2 years ago. Now the latest version, the N900, comes with everything needed: big screen 800x480), GSM/3G, fast processor, hardware graphic acceleration, lot of storage, real keyboard, a good user interface and many other elements. And of course, like the previous versions ... it runs Linux.

The main goal in buying the N900 was to make it run Mobile IPv6 using UMIP (the device comes with a 2.6.28 kernel so it is just a matter of enabling some kernel options) and then test the IPsec Route Optimization extensions I specified on a real platform. This is a work in progress.

 


N900 commented hardware specifications

I started working on a dedicated page, commenting hardware specifications and providing additional information on how the hardware is supported by the kernel, free and proprietary userland software.

Basically, if you ask yourself something about a specific hardware part of the device, you may find an answer on that page. This is a work in progress: it is updated each time I learn anything new on the hardware.

 


Building/porting applications for the N900

As they were not available in external repositories, I started porting applications that I find useful. I wrote dedicated pages for the records for those interested:

Those marked as available [A] can be installed from my N900 repository. You can either open this link or add the repository manually (Application manager > Application catalogs > New ) using following parameters

If you want to pass it to apt-key, the repository key is here with its signature:

n900# wget -q http://natisbad.org/debian-n900/n900-debian-repo.key
n900# wget -q http://natisbad.org/debian-n900/n900-debian-repo.key.sig
n900# gpg --verify n900-debian-repo.key.sig
gpg: Signature made Wed 03 Mar 2010 10:57:03 AM CET using RSA key ID A7AE341B
gpg: Good signature from "Arnaud Ebalard <arno@natisbad.org>"
n900# apt-key add n900-debian-repo.key
OK

I know I should probably take the time to push the packages to extras-devel. This is on a long todo list.

 


Building a custom kernel for your N900

As discussed above, the kernel that comes on the device is a 2.6.28. This means it comes with everything needed to support MIPv6 with IPsec and IKE ... but the required options are not enabled in the image provided by Nokia. For that reason (you may have different), I need a custom image.

In order to do that, after having installed the SDK, this can be achieved quite easily. I have written a short page describing everything in details. It is available here.

 


Current linux-omap kernel on Nokia N900?

I started looking at what is needed to get current linux-omap kernel running on Nokia N900. This is discussed here.

 


N900 keyboard remapping

You would like your N900 keyboard to have more keys. Granted!

 


N900 Tips and Tricks

I have a started a dedicated pages to put everything regarding the N900 that does not belong to other specific pages. If you are looking for additional general information on the day-to-day use of the device, it is available here.