Nokia N900 Necromancy

The iPhone was out two years ago before the N900.

Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.

Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.

tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.

Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.

I picked up Linux at 13, fortuitously just in time for the release of the Nokia 770 (later getting, and still owning the N900 too).

At that time, getting real dirty with the kernel, hardware, cross compiling etc was necessary, so 1) there were more resources 2) it was seen as mundane, busy work rather than mystical and difficult.

If I were to say how to learn the same things today, I’d probably say Gentoo is ideal - it’s insanely flexible in tinkering, has good resources on compiling the kernel and packages, and I’m a fan of crossdev for cross compiling.

Getting real dirty with hardware and electronics, the obvious answer would be one of the Raspberry Pi lineup, but if you’re very tenacious, patient and a touch unhinged, then I would actually say now’s the time to get in on RISC-V.

It’s still early days, so there’s lots of resources that have very thin abstractions between hardware tooling code. Devices are cheap and exciting. You’ll be on the same footing as most other people so you won’t feel like a dunce.

The cons are that a lot of RISC-V devices get shipped out with very little documentation (and sometimes only in Chinese), binary blobs making mainstream kernels difficult, and you’re learning at the same time, so you might feel you’re ice skating uphill.

Wrt to the bootloader and partition corruption; towards the twilight years of the life of the N900, when it became clear N900 had been abandoned and the N950 was still only available to select few, a bunch of smart people on the Maemo forums started reversing and writing open drivers (uboot bootloader, wifi, camera iirc), so they became pretty documented.

I have friends who started with porting Sailfish OS to their old Android phone and now they are designing their own PCBs for their home automation system. They custom built their own RC cars, 3D printed their own ergonomic keyboards, designed their holiday decorative lights etc..

I have seen a lot of people in my local FPV Drone Racing community, who started with building their own custom drone and then moved on to 3D printing their modifications, tweaking their firmware, building their custom lithium battery packs, designing their ergonomic keyboards, and now fiddling with their home automation software/hardware.

Also installing Arch Linux onto some random piece of hardware, regularly following Hackaday like blogs seems to help.. lol.

Good read. I did the exact same modification to my N900; it was my internet router for several years. In those days, a mobile carrier in my country offered a relatively cheap data plan for dumb phones: unlimited data, but restricted internet connectivity with a WAP proxy. Fortunately, thanks to curl and busybox utils, I figured out that the proxy allowed CONNECT requests, and a tiny C program on my N900 was able to transparently tunnel all TCP connections to the internet.

BTW, my N900 had another mod: it featured a Type-A female port :)