Flashing the N900.

I have been using the N900 for almost 2 years. I've upgraded from PR1.1 to PR1.2 and PR1.3 and more recently CSSU. I have installed countless things from extras-testing and extras-devel and have never had any serious problems.

Until one fateful day 2 weeks ago when I started to realise the battery life was getting worse by the day. The battery was draining at about 2-3% an hour on standby. A few days before, I had installed speedpatch and batterypatch. I thought that was the cause, so I promptly removed them. But the issue remained. (I suspect that speedpatch permanently broke the kernel setup somehow, from reading the forums I found others who concur.)

I tried running top and powertop and found the CPU was running at C0 constantly, with 12-20% constant CPU load%. I tried everything I could to find the source of the issue. I un-installed things for testing until I practically un-installed everything I used and it was still the same.

So I was left with no choice but to re-flash the firmware. I had never done it before. I read through the wiki. It was quite confusing at first. I didn't have an Ubuntu box around so I had to use my Windows 7 laptop at work. Unfortunately I had the 64bit version and had to jump through additional hoops to make the flasher recognise the N900. I decided to start from scratch. Backed up all my files and save games and flashed both eMMC and FIASCO images.

Afterwards I restored my contact data from backup but not my settings or anything else. I was advised against it, to ensure the problem does not return from a restored backup. I started to put back all my data & re-install everything I needed. Since I use the N900 as my everyday phone, I decided to install Stable CSSU this time instead of testing.

The fresh image really made the phone much faster and much more responsive than ever before. I've now quite glad I did it and I'm enjoying the phone like it was new. The battery now lasts even longer than the first day I got it. It goes down only 2% in 5 hours on standby.

Increasingly more people are finding they have issues after installing speedpatch and batterypatch. I'd advise against installing these patches.

CSSU, Nitdroid and Preenv-hd

I've been running CSSU for a few months & it's been exceptionally stable. There are crashes here there, especially with some application that didn't like to be started in portrait mode. Battery life seems to suffer a bit with all the auto-rotation going on. But overall, the experience has been positive.

I also installed Nitdroid 2 weeks ago. Mainly just to fool around & play some games I'm missing out on. I install the N12 UMay release of Gingerbread onto an Apacer 8GB Class 10 MicroSDHC card. It takes about 3 minutes to boot, in operations it's a little laggy, but bearable. I only play some games, so it's all I need. It's definitely NOT recommended to run the Nitdroid as the main OS, alot of things still don't work. For one, you can't make phone calls, can't take pictures & also the phone doesn't manage power well, it runs really hot when playing games & sucks through the battery in only an hour or 2. The battery meter is screwed too, so you won't know you're dry till it switches off.

Anyway, I got tired of Android & I'm back to running Maemo again. I was searching for games when I stumbled onto preenv-hd. Someone made a patch over Preenv 0.1.7 that allowed HP Touchpad games to be playable through Preenv. This is great since there a few more games for WebOS that are for the Touchpad only. I found a few I really liked:
- DoodlePoolHD
- Slice It! HD
- Quell HD
Not the mention the more updated versions of Angry Birds Rio and Seasons.
So preenv-hd is keeping my inner gamer happy for now.

Maemo 5 Community SSU

I finally took the plunge & went ahead to install the CSSU. It's currently at v15.

The install process was painfully slow. I'm not sure why, but downloading supposedly 28MB worth of files took well over 6 hours. I had leave it overnight. Fortunately, when it was done in the morning the upgrade went without a hitch.

The resulting desktop was by all accounts completely identical to the one before. I had to do some digging to make sure everything was working as it should. Only a few things were visible:
- an Orientation Lock button appeared in the status menu.
- the application menu rotates to portrait.
- the status menu rotates to portrait.

I immediately installed the CSSU Feature Configuration Editor & switched on the new 2 column task manager.

Have not run into any issues yet, but it's too early to tell, a couple more days & we'll see. So far, so good.