MortenCB's blog

Every morning I record the Radio 1 morningshow as an ogg-file, and transfer it to my mobile to listen to it in the car on the way to work. This way I am not depending on coverage the whole way, and I can skip the commercials. With the builtin FM-sender of the N900, this is a perfect solution…

So, I want an icon on my desktop to start the mediaplayer and start playing the radio1-file. This is how you do it:

1)
Make a file to start the mediaplayer with the radio1-file. Mine is /opt/script/radio1.sh:
#!/bin/sh
dbus-send –print-reply –dest=com.nokia.mediaplayer /com/nokia/mediaplayer com.nokia.mediaplayer.mime_open string:”file:////home/user/MyDocs/.sounds/radio1_bergen.ogg”

2) Make a file for your desktop-button. It should be located in /usr/share/applications/hildon/ and be called something that ends in .desktop, mine is radio1.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Name=radio1
Exec=/usr/bin/osso-xterm /opt/script/radio1.sh
Icon=
X-Window-Icon=
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable
X-Icon-Path=/usr/share/icons

3) Link it to your desktop as any other program.

4) If you want a custom icon you can either type the name of an existing icon in the file above (without path and file-ending, the actual icons are in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/*), or make your own. To make your own, make png-files with the following sizes (don’t really know which are being used, but the following should be enough):
26×26
32×32
40×40
48×48
64×64
one a bit larger
All of them should be png-files, and put into the respective folders under /usr/share/icons/hicolor/. The last one should go in the scalable-folder, and all of them should be called the same, f.ex. radio1.png. The full path to f.ex. the 64×64-version would be:
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/64×64/apps/radio1.png
Then in the file above, change the icon-lines to be
Icon=radio1
X-Window-Icon=radio1
After you input the new icon, you should turn the N900 off and on again to get the device to load the new icon. You could also try the following command, but it didn’t work for me:
gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor/

Enjoy your new one-click-play-my-file-desktop-icon 🙂

The tracker is a pretty smart daemon that runs in the background, and indexes all your music, photos and so on. The problem for me, was that this process either took all the cpu all the time, or it did nothing, and no music or photos was being indexed…

I found that the problem is the “Extra decoder-support” package. Remove it, then run the following command in a terminal window: “tracker-processes -r”, this will remove your index. Then start the media-player, and it should start indexing your files again.

The N900 is more than capable of playing most non-HD videos. However, the built-in mediaplayer isn’t all that great, so you should go and install mplayer. Then install SiB which is a front-end for mplayer, and you’re set to go.

This is especially nice since you can connect the N900 to your TV with the cable that came with it. Watching movies in the bedroom, hotelroom and so on never was easier 🙂

Enjoy.

When you press the power on/off-button, a quick-menu appears. It has poweroff, but not reboot. This can be easily fixed:

1) Open /etc/systemui/systemui.xml in your favourite editor
2) Move the comment over the line with “Reboot” down a few lines before the next menuitem.
3) Save and reboot, and voila. You now have a reboot-button on your quick menu.

Example of how the block should look after you move the comment:

6
osso-powerup-shutdown

The hildon-welcome is fully configurable. You don’t even need to replace the original Nokia animation, you can choose to run that and something else, or just something else. How to do it:

1) Copy the video to /usr/share/hildon-welcome/media/
2) Go to /etc/hildon-welcome.d/ and edit the default.conf file or create a similar one (the videos will play by the alphabetic order of the .conf files)
3) Reboot and watch in awe at your result.

Some great videos made by claesbas over at talk.maemo.org are attached to this post. I especially loved the flyby 🙂