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.

1. Open terminal app
2. To gain “root” access to your N900 type
   sudo gainroot
3. Make a directory to store the videos with
   mkdir /opt/bootvideos
4. Now move your downloaded videos there with
   mv /home/user/MyDocs/tmp/*.avi /opt/bootvideos/
5. Now you’ll need to create a symbolic link for your videos in the directory that the N900 expects to find videos.  This path is /usr/share/hildon-welcome/media.  Use this one-liner command to do this automagically:
   for i in /opt/bootvideos/*; do ln -s $i /usr/share/hildon-welcome/media/$(echo $i | awk ‘BEGIN { FS=”/” } ; { print $4 }’); done
6. Once the symlinks are created for all your videos, now all you need to do is modify /etc/hildon-welcome.d/default.conf
   Change the one line in that file to name the video you’d like to use as your boot video
   [hildon-welcome]
   filename=newbootvideo.avi
7. TIP: You can play multiple videos upon bootup by creating multiple .conf files.  It will play them in alphabetical order based on .conf file name.  So to play a second video after the default.conf one, you can create a file named something like maemo.conf and then add contents to it like this:
   [hildon-welcome]
   filename=secondvideo.avi

Here’s some links to threads on talk.maemo.org which contain videos or further information on how to change it.  Enjoy!

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32935

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=43040

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40803