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Are you in a liking of chess games? Playing with the AI doesn’t seem as good as playing with real players for you? Then you should totally check out Miniature, an FICS client for Maemo!

Miniature is currently only available at Extras-devel, which means you would want it enabled in your repo list. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean the game is not good enough for everyday use, I myself have tested many releases and they work perfectly. In case if you need help enabling it, check out this wiki article. Make sure to disable it right after downloading the package though.

Now, Miniature enables you to play games hosted at FICS with thousands of players all across the world and even allows you to play P2P games with people nearby or with people in your contacts list. Registering at FICS is not required, but is recommended, if you want to keep easy track of your own games and stats. Host a game or join one of those already available and you’re ready to dive into a nice game of chess with anyone. And you even have easy to use text chat!

Miniature also holds quite some learning possibilities, as you can watch games already played, view chess lessons and participate in one of the tournaments FICS often holds! In case if you would want to play different kinds of chess, like antichess, Miniature allows that too.

A great client for every chess player, or just somebody who would want a nice game while waiting for the bus to arrive, Miniature is definitely worth checking out.

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Want to read some of your favorite articles on Wikipedia? But what if you don’t have any internet available for some reason? Or maybe you just want to save up money or battery charge for keeping internet connection.

Evopedia will allow you to download an archive of all Wikipedia articles and read them online, optimized for the N900 screen size.

Archives of Wikipedia for many different languages are available. A few Wiktionary archives can be downloaded as well.  A demo archive with 999 articles is available under the name “small”.

Note: Most archives take up more than 100 mB of space on your MyDocs, make sure you have space.

As soon as you download the archive(s), you can search for any article from the main screen. Since all archives are stored locally, the search is very fast. Pick any article and it will be opened in your Web application, and easy to read, thanks to optimized view.

One and only problem I had with Evopedia is that most archives are downloaded via BitTorrent, which takes up a lot of system resources and sometimes can be very unresponsive. Maemo’s watchdog reboots the phone in such occasions and this sometimes messes up the file system. In case if you get a problem with MyDocs mounted read-only, run this as root and reboot the phone (don’t worry, you won’t lose any files):

  fsck.vfat -a /dev/mmcblk0p1

Apart from that, Evopedia provides a nice and easy way to read Wikipedia articles without having any internet connection whatsoever.

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Note: The steps we go through this how-to include modifying low-level system files. Changing the loading bar is done at your risk, do not attempt if you think that you might mess something up or if you don’t understand some parts of this how-to.

Want to make your boot sequence more cooler? Maemo allows you to change the loading bar that appears at startup.

First, we want to go root:

sudo gainroot

Next, backup the files we want to change:

cd /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon

mkdir /home/user/MyDocs/Bar_Backup

cp indicator_update* /home/user/MyDocs/Bar_Backup

Now, for the fun part. Create your own loading bar images. You may use the originals as a base, you would want 8 PNG images with a size of 192×48, alpha-channel is optional. You can look at this custom loading bar set, for example. Name them all as indicator_update?.png, with ? going from 1 to 8, in the order you want the images to appear.

Drop all the images to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon

cp -f [your images] /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/

Once done, try rebooting your phone and checking out if all went smoothly.

Enjoy!

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Sometimes you just really need for a certain command to be executed every X minutes. Or maybe you could use something that will notify you to check your bags every hour. Not a problem, Alarmed will help you with that.

Alarmed is a little GUI app that allows you to schedule any sort of event to be done at a certain time, pretty much like cron, an utility well known to every *nix administrator.

Install alarmed:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install alarmed

Once launched, you’ll see a screen with all your currently scheduled events and buttons for creating new events, removing and editing current events.

Creating a new event is simple with a user-friendly interface of Alarmed: press a button, chose what exactly will be done at that event and schedule a time.

Easy and effective, now you don’t need to constantly remind yourself to walk the dog or switch your profile to silent when you’re at a conference.

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Do you like strategy games? Well, then you probably have heard of “The Battle for Wesnoth”, a popular free software turn based strategy game with a strong, Tolkienesque fantasy setting. But did you know that there is a complete port of this PC game for Maemo?

The game is currently available in Extras, you can find it in the Games category.

sudo gainroot

apt-get install wesnoth

Note that the game is pretty large and will consume about 240~ Mb of memory on your /opt Unpacking a large package can also take a lot of time, so make sure you have enough battery charge.

Optionally install the music files. (Not recommended as this will take up 100 Mb more of memory and will slow down the game a bit):

apt-get install wesnoth-music

Once installed, you can launch the game from your applications menu or with

wesnoth

Loading times can be a drag, but apart from that and a few resolution issues with menus, the game is completely playable. Add-ons, Multiplayer, Singleplayer campaigns are all functional. I was able to both finish one of the mainline campaigns and play co-op survival on the official server without any trouble, right with an N900 in my hand.

The Battle for Wesnoth is definitely a game every N900 gamer should take a look at. So install the package and dive into the world of dwarves, elves and orcs!

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Are you in need of special symbols while in X Terminal? Don’t want to bring up the special characters menu all the time? Well, here’s an easy way to customize the special characters  line on the bottom of your X Terminal window.

Open up your XTerm and use those commands to modify the characters line:

Note: Run these commands as a regular user, not root.

Modify the key labels:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels -t list –list-type=string “[keylabels]“

Replace keylabels with the set of labels you want to use, separated by colons without any whitespaces. You’re free to use any text, just don’t use labels too long. The maximum safe amount of labels you can use is 7, if you use more, they will all go to a side-menu.  For example, if we are to add pipe, input and tilde symbols you can use this:  Tab,Esc,PgUp,PgDn,|,>,~

Next, set the characters that those labels will correspond to:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys -t list –list-type=string “[character values]“

Replace character values with the corresponding values. You can look up which values respond to which characters by looking at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51 file (do it as a regular user, so you don’t modify it by accident)

If we follow the example for pipe, input and tilde characters, we shall use these values: Tab,Escape,Page_Up,Page_Down,bar,greater,asciitilde

Restart your X Terminal, so the fullscreen button goes where it should go and enjoy!

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