Having recently sorted out a wifi connection at home and bought a couple 2GB SD cards, my n800 has suddenly come to life. But what has really made it sparkle is booting from the internal MMC card. Plenty more space and also almost double the speed. For anyone who hasn't done this to their n800 yet I can very much recommend it.

The procedure is easy and painless and is detailed on this page: HowTo EASILY Boot From MMC card. The only thing that didn't work in the instructions was this command

# insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/current/ext2.ko

I guess it was a typo, at least /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/current/ was completely empty. I used the module in /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.18-omap1/ instead, and everything is fine

# insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.18-omap1/ext2.ko

Incidentally, I'm using a D-Link DAP-1160 Wireless G Access Point connected to the uplink of my wired router for the wifi network. It uses GPL licensed code and comes with a printed GPL license, which is nice to see.

I wanted to listen to the French radio stations France Inter and Europe1 on my n800 internet tablet but found that I could not launch the players available on their web sites using the browsers, (or, more likely, the Flash plugin), on the n800.

Should anyone else want to do the same and face the same problem, this is how I got around it.

1. The following software packages are required:
osso-xterm
becomeroot
MPlayer

2. Create the following 2 wrapper scripts with your favourite text editor.

#!/bin/sh

mplayer http://vipicecast.yacast.net/europe1

Save it as europe1 in the folder called Documents.

#!/bin/sh

mplayer http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/franceinter/all/franceinterhautdebit.mp3

Save it as finter in the folder called Documents.

Start xterm and issue the following commands to make the scripts executable and copy them to /usr/bin/

# cd /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/
# chmod +x europe1
# chmod +x finter
# sudo gainroot
# cp europe1 /usr/bin/
# cp finter /usr/bin/

3. Download these 2 images to the folder called Documents.

Then, still in your xterm session, copy them to the correct location.

# cp europe1.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/
# cp fr_inter.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/

4. Create the following 2 desktop files with your favourite text editor.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.0.1
Name=Europe1
Comment=Listen to Europe1 with mplayer
Exec=osso-xterm -e /usr/bin/europe1
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=europe1
X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=europe1
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Save it as europe1.desktop in the folder called Documents.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.0.1
Name=France Inter
Comment=Listen to France Inter with mplayer
Exec=osso-xterm -e /usr/bin/finter
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=fr_inter
X-Icon-path=/usr/share/icons
X-Window-Icon=fr_inter
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Save it as franceinter.desktop in the folder called Documents.

Then, again still in your xterm session, copy them to the correction locations.

# cp europe1.desktop /etc/others-menu/extra_applications/
# cp europe1.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/
# cp franceinter.desktop /etc/others-menu/extra_applications/
# cp franceinter.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/

They will then be accessible from the Extras menu. A click will launch xterm which will spawn mplayer and load the stream.

Thanks to a very generous donation from Claws Mail user Guido Rudolphi, Colin and I are now owners of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. This will enable us to discover just how justified the complaints from the oh-so-demanding n800 users of Claws Mail actually are, and where other improvements can be made.

As the n800 runs GNU/Linux and a modified Debian, using it is fun and easy. I don't have a wi-fi connection, so it's not as much fun as is it might be; I have to download packages on my main PC and then copy them onto the n800 via USB, so it's not quite as easy either. I wanted to upgrade the firmware, as you do when you get a new device such as this, but it was no-go, just forever waiting at "Suitable USB device not found, waiting". I guess that the device-mapping has changed since flasher-3.0 was written, but I'm still not sure. Anyway, this sort of stuff doesn't stand in my way.

Here are a few screenshots (click the image for a larger version)

Claws Mail XTerm desktop

Having one of these devices is a big incentive to actually spend a little more time looking at the maemo bug reports and feature requests, and to spend time contributing to Jean-Luc Biord's Maemo port, but not to the detriment of Claws Mail as a desktop app, that will retain the main focus.

Let the hacking commence!

Claws Mail Maemo port: http://www.claws-mail.org/maemo/
Claws Mail at the Maemo Garage: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/claws-mail
Jean-Luc Biord's page at maemopeople.org: http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php/jlbrd/