There's been a surge in new user questions lately. This surprises me, since I didn't expect there to be new users for a discontinued product (the N900).

My second N900, the one I got after my first one's USB port broke, is looking old and battered.

Is there somewhere you can buy new N900s, or are you trying new things on your old N900s?

i'm from the philippines and found two brand N900's in two cities. it's still possible that there are people here who just bought a brand new device. plus, have you seen reggie's post: talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=82019?
there are still lots of regular TMO visitors and we still get spikes from time to time. as somebody mentioned somewhere, "The N900 refuses to die."

@qole
Viva en-nine-hundred... mmm ... not sure that has much of a ring but you get what I mean. Because of its uniqueness, lots of us won't let the N900 die!

As far as buying new one is concerned: yup, it's still possible in the UK, unless all the vendors are spoofs! Getting one from from an actual shop is unlikely. A lot of devices for sale are second hand though. The N900 got a bad repuatation for unreliability and being over-complicated, especially amonst sales staff. I also think Nokia had a bad reputation well before Nov 2009. Therefore, the N900 didn't really sell, especially in zones dominated by carrier subsidies. It's possible that the devices that didn't sell might have been bought up en-masse for resale elsewhere?

As you and many others commented: speed aside, the N900 is unmatched by any other device currently available.

Back to ED: have you tested the most recent image? Any thoughts/comments/etc.?

I'm back at home, and I'm just downloading Estel's image tonight. I'll let you know when things are up and running via the installer.

But again, I strongly suggest Estel takes discussion of his image to a new thread here in Alternatives, leaving this thread for discussion of the scripts and stuff.

I've added Estel's image to the installer. But it is really clear when running LXDE that we need to figure out a way to set up different environments for different images.

I suggest we look into using the embedded startup scripts to configure the user's environment when using these contributed images.

Thanks, qole! I waited with new thread, until image appear "officially" in the installer. Do you feel like adding LibreOffice and Chromium .desktop files into the package as well, or do You think, that they should be downloadable from somewhere else (dedicated thread, or via embedded startup script)?

Also, could You elaborate more on:

...? I don't exactly get what You mean - what things, that require environmental variables tweaking have You observed? Would love to get it straight before "announcing", as I'm quite a noon when it comes to such things (enviroment tweaking).

/Estel

// Edit

I'm not surprised by high interest in N900-related things at all. First of all, Maemo and N900 have no very high momentum - IMO, higher than in *any* moment of it's history, including release (talking about actual contributions, not chit-chat - see CSSU and kernel-power).

Second, You may agree with it or not, but for many people, N9(50) is a total or almost-total failure. There is (still) no competing device for N900, even on far horizon - latest Nokia products, seems to be targeted on quite different target group - Personally, I would say, that it's close to what WebOS used to be. But, of course, it's off-topic here.

@qole

how to install printer drivers on easy deb??

i've succeed installing libreoffice yesterday.. it's great, but now i want to install cups and i see this line..

dpkg-reconfigure cups
Stopping Common Unix Printing System: cupsd.
Starting Common Unix Printing System: cupsdFATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.28.10-power49+pre50/modules.dep: No such file or directory
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.28.10-power49+pre50/modules.dep: No such file or directory
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.28.10-power49+pre50/modules.dep: No such file or directory

tell me what should i do??
thank you

Estel: I mean we could put image-specific configuration files inside the image, and then use the embedded startup scripts (probably onfirstchroot-ext.rc to copy the config files into the /home/user directory. Alternatively, the image's onfirstchroot-ext.rc script could unmount the Maemo /home/user directory and use the image's version instead. That's probably the best, it would maintain per-image config files and let the user personalize them.

As for the N9, it is still very early days. There's a bluetooth keyboard app in the Nokia store already, and open mode works well. Interestingly, there's no keyboard focus problems on Harmattan, even though they said the keyboard focus problem wasn't a bug on the N900...

Concept of using config file per-image is great, but when it goes to my image, it doesn't contain any specific thing in /home/user Personally I use modified .xbindkeysrc and different .chroot, but it's not dependent on any particular image, it's just about my preferences (running from dedicated partition as opposed top image file, etc).

I'll try to prepare announcement thread today.

/Estel

// Edit

As per N9(50), time won't change hardware fails - capacitive screen, lack of SD slots, lack of easily-removable battery, etc. Using external keyboard is also hardly a solution for developing/overall productivity on-the-go.

Using Estel's prepared image, when launching Chromium -> aboutlugins, this is the list i see - there is no flash plugin - Estel is this what you have and flash is working when you use youtube?