TuxRunner

Here’s some steps you can take to install some new boot videos on your N900, and then store them in /opt so that you don’t take up storage space on rootfs.  You’ll need to first find some boot videos that you’d like to use.  Typically I’ve been finding a great collection of them posted to the forums over at http://talk.maemo.org.  Looks like the best format for them is AVI format from what I’m reading in the posts on that forum.

Download them to your N900 either over the internal browser, or transfer them over USB cable.  I put them under /home/user/MyDocs/tmp (which will show up as /N900/tmp on the device).  Then go through these steps to set them up “optified”, which just means that you’ll be storing them in some of the 32GB of space the N900 has instead of the limited storage available on the “rootfs” filesystem. (continue reading…)

So just in the past few weeks I’ve been seeing a fair amount of news articles and blog postings around the Internet showing attempts at getting other OSes running on the Nokia N900.  Some of them are surprising, and others aren’t.  But here’s a small list of some examples of other operating systems that have been known to run on the N900.  Yes, some are under an emulated environment, but I’m still counting it even if it is emulated.  What I’m not going to dive into here is the console game systems that have been successfully emulated on the N900.  That’s a whole other article.

Windows 3.1/95/98/NT4 – Appears that it’s possible to run Windows on the Nokia N900 under an emulation package called DOSBox.  DOSBox has been around for about 8 years now and runs on many different host OSes such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.  It’s emulates an x86 PC with DOS and includes sound, graphics, joystick, mouse, and modem support.  DOSBox was ported to Maemo5 and allows the N900 to run old video games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.  So since it emulates a full x86/DOS environment, why not try running one of those older OSes to see if they work? (continue reading…)

I just discovered Kino (yes, I moved the rock I’ve been living under).  Since I’ve been home resting and recovering from a surgery, the wife had an idea for me to transfer all our digital video from an old Canon video camera over to the Drobo.  I’ve only done this once in the past with a Windows laptop and a Firewire card using the built-in tools in Windows.  So I set out on a mission to find something that would do the same under Linux.

Turns out there’s actually a handful of good applications out there for Linux that can be used for video editing.  Since I’m no pro, I found Kino to have a very good basic interface that’s easy to learn, and it out of the box supports the ability to capture video from any Firewire-connected video device.  Even has the ability to control your camera using on-screen buttons for rewind, play, pause, fast-forward, and more. (continue reading…)