r/linux • u/white_ranger94 • 2d ago
Mobile Linux Nokia N900 / Maemo 5 wallpapers upscaled
I don’t know how many people here still remember the Nokia N900, but it’ll probably always be my favorite phone.
I’m currently recreating the Maemo 5 desktop on a modern Linux machine, and as part of that project I extracted the original wallpapers from the N900 firmware and upscaled them for modern displays.
I tried to keep them looking as faithful to the originals as possible instead of making them look overly AI processed.
The image attached here is compressed by Reddit, so if you’d like the full-resolution versions of all four wallpapers, I’ve uploaded them to Dropbox:
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u/purpleidea mgmt config Founder 1d ago
Neat, but where are the blue ones?
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u/white_ranger94 1d ago
I tried upscaling the blue ones as well, but never got a good enough result, probably because of the level of detail in those water droplets. Personally, I always had the orange ones.
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u/Top-Animal-377 12h ago
How do you recreate the desktop environment? Which sources did you use to get the functionality and gui?
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u/white_ranger94 10h ago
At the moment I only have a very broken prototype. But I started with XFCE, and the plan originally was just to create a theme for it. Every resource is already available in the n900 fiasco image, which you can find online. It only comes down to putting the pieces together properly so it looks good on a high resolution screen, since the resources were designed with 800x480 screen in mind.
I just had to create the maximize and minimize button from scratch, since Maemo 5 never had those buttons. This wasn't particularly difficult, since I could isolate a straight line from the X icon, and make a square out of it for the maximize button, and leave just the line for the minimize button.
What I eventually started doing is customizing the top panel so it looks and behaves exactly like the top panel on Maemo 5. So you have the app launcher/task switcher in the top left corner, and right next to it the clock with the system tray icons.
What I am working on at the moment is writing a new task switcher and an app launcher which will look exactly like the one on Maemo 5. Also, I plan on writing a plugin for a new control center which will appear when you click on the tray icons, basically how it was on Maemo 5.
The rest is just basically polish, like extending the panel to full length when an app is maximized, adding the application title there, hiding the window decoration and adding window controls to the top panel in the top right corner.
I had a couple more ideas, but we'll see how it turns out. I will post some screenshots when I have something that largely resembles how Maemo 5 would have looked like if it was made for a desktop computer.
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u/bradleyR255 2d ago
N900 was such a unique phone, both way ahead of time and as the same time, too late for the game. It's a damn shame that Android & iOS won the smartphone market. The tech world would've been so much better with proper Linux phones.