Create your own background for the N900

A quick post, since I haven’t been blogging in quite some time now. Today I created my own background image for my phone, the Nokia N900 running on Maemo. The background in general consists of N number of images, where N is a number which is maximum of 4. I had a panorama image from Aiguille du Midi which I wanted to use, which was created using Hugin. I needed a way to split the panorama correctly in four, so that the stitching wouldn’t show when I switched desktops.

The solution I found was in Gimp. Load the panoramic picture into Gimp (this could also be a panoramic crop of a normal image obviously). Use the choice "Image – Guides – New Guide (by percent)" three times, so that you end up with a vertical guide at 25%, 50% and 75%. The result is shown below.

Then, go to "Image – Transform – Guillotine" and split the image by guides. The four pictures will pop up with reasonable naming, save those and add them as background images on the respective desktops on your mobile. Screenshot below.

Edit: If you want this particular background on your phone, you can find it here.