About one month ago I decided that it was time to start blogging here. In the FN blogs. As you can see, it took a while to put that to work.

On this first, and hopefully not the last, I want to talk about the PC Connectivity project. PC Connectivity is very nice piece of software that makes the communication between maemo based devices and your PC very easy (from the user point of view). It is know to work with the n8xx devices, and I believe that it can also work with the very new n900 (I cannot guarantee it). PC Connectivity supports tasks such as:

• Connection establishment
• Internet sharing
• Remote shell
• File sharing
• Remote desktop
• File transfer

All this can be done with very few configuration effort from the user, and what is very nice is that you are not tied to any OS. You can use it from you Linux, Mac OS Leopard and Windows XP/Vista (the developers say Windows 7 is under testing, but hopefully it should work as good as in Vista).

Installation is very simple and can be done from the application manager on the device. You just need to add (if you haven´t done it already) the extras-devel repository. To proceed, open the Application Manager, then go to Repository catalogs, add a new repository and fill the fields with the following data:

• Catalogue Name: Maemo extras-devel
• Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel
• Distribution: fremantle
• Components: free non-free 

Save, reload the catalog, search fo the pc-connectivity-manager package and install it.

Now, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

deb http://pc-connectivity.garage.maemo.org/repository intrepid main

Finally, reload the repositories and install the host-pc-connectivity package

apt-get update

pt-get install host-pc-connectivity

If your're not in Ubuntu or Debian you should follow specific instructions on their web site. Windows users should first install cygwin with the following packages:

• Admin/cygrunsrv
• Net/nfs-server
• Net/openssh
• Net/rsync
• X11/xinit
• X11/xdpyinfo

and then download host-pc-connectivity for Windows.

If you prefer, you can download the last version from their repository.

Now you can play around with it and see how easy it can be to connect your maemo device to your PC using USB clable, or wlan or Bluetooth.

That's all for now. Hope to have more things to post here soon.