WTFM

The following tips have been tested with Maemo 5 (Fremantle) PR1.3 on the Nokia N900 mobile device. Some of them will NOT WORK using prior Maemo releases.

Extended call log

This provides a listing of incoming, outgoing, missed calls or all of those, and unlike the default application it shows every call to or from a given contact individually, not just the latest one. Duration of calls are also shown (when viewing a specific entry) where available.

1. Install Extended Call Log app (V0.5) from the maemo.org catalog
2. Adjust the database so that end times of calls are recorded. (The correct version of the file with SQL commands has 1978 bytes in it.)

Dual booting with MeeGo 1.1 (and later)

Update: these instructions should be applicable for MeeGo 1.2 Release candidate 1 as well. Do it at your own risk, though…

Note that MeeGo 1.1 isn't exactly finished… :-) But it should be possible to make and receive calls. It is very slow for me (and others, apparently), e.g. starting even the dialing application can take 10 seconds or more; most things are only half-finished; etc. Also, it's likely to be at least a very heavy battery drain (there is no powersaving at all or it does not work properly; for me, the backlight can stay on for hours despite no action being taken). Do this at your own risk!

In principle, though, the approach I used is quite simple:

1. Make sure you have a 4 GB microSD card. ¹
2. Follow the instructions carefully. ² Note: on the page that is linked to from there, only follow the instructions under the Installing Rootfs on external MMC card heading. ³ In particular, the instructions under the Load or flash kernel on N900 heading should be ignored if you intend to dual boot with uboot-pr13 or similar. (If not, read the warnings…)

Note that 1.1 takes its time to boot (likely a few minutes), and it may display just a white screen for a minute or two.

Footnotes

¹ It says 2 GB in the main instructions linked to here, but 4 GB is suggested elsewhere and should be enough for anybody. Note that while it is possible that using the SD card may be the main limiting factor in terms of speed¹, I suspect there might be more to this picture, especially since this is at a very early stage. My own experience is that with an (advertised) 4MBps, or "class 4" card; that said, I haven't bothered to buy anything superior / inferior for comparison. If relevant, the built-in storage appears to be more like a "class 20", though I haven't done much of read / write measurements there.
² Also read the disclaimers on there.
³ Personally I did not have an appropriate adapter handy, so I unpacked the image on my desktop computer, copied it to the N900 and then installed it from there (see instructions (scroll down to "On the N900 itself")). If you do this, be really, really, sure you're not overwriting Maemo itself! Note also that you may have to close any running programs (that access the desired partition) if you can't mount it over the USB otherwise. dd-ing the image via the device itself (don't even think about unpacking it there) can be problematic, though. It's possible that you may have to write chunks at a time (e.g. no more than you have free RAM, or probably like 128 MB or so). Not sure why but it seems one of the later Maemo 5 updates resulted in things being kept in memory longer than appropriate. For now, I would strongly recommend getting a card reader! (It also makes it somewhat easier to avoid mistakes.)

Miscellaneous

• MeeGo 1.2RC1
• For 1.1, there are also images on meego.com, but I do not know what the difference might be.