Disable charging of a Nokia N900 while USB connected.

One of the joys of having a hackable computer serving as a phone is that you can do stuff which have no “option” in “settings”. Recently I wanted to see if I can connect it to an Android tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1). I couldn’t. Too bad as I could really use the extra 32Gb the n900 has to offer. It would connect but the tablet disconnects it as soon as the phone tries to start charging.

All I had to do was issue:

stop bme

in a root console before connecting the phone to the tablet. After finishing I ran:

start bme

to restore everything to normal.