Ok, I'm new to the N-series platform (haven't got one yet, but have been playing with the dev kit / emulator). However, I'm a long-time Zaurus user.

Question on porting apps. From looking around the various forums & mailing lists, there are a lot of comments about various missing applicaitons. Since Maemo is basically a vanilla X11 system with a regular window manager and standard GTK libs, what issues do people have porting regular Linux apps over to the N series? Is it due to the need to convert apps so they are usable on a tablet device (i.e., no right-click available, and mouse-moves-with-click-only)? Or is there additional customizations needed to get apps to recognize the Maemo input methods and desktop semantics (task bar icons, menus, window management)? Otherwise, what is to stop one from grabbing the varisous source packages from Debian ARM and re-compiling them under the dev kit? (including using debian package dependencies to automatically pull in any missing libraries).

As for resource constraints, if you look at Meanie's Zaurus page, there's a bunch of heavy X11 apps that's been compiled to run under the various X implementations for the Z, including Gimp, Openoffice, the full Firefox, etc.

If the main issue is getting everything blended into the standard Maemo interface, then how about this idea: Put together a bunch of applications that assume a standard window manager / desktop environment. Then when you want to run these apps, simply run them under X-nest, which would have it's own window manager running. Now this environment would only be kicked off if you are using the N800 in mini-workstation mode, hooked up to a usb or bluetooth keyboard & mouse.

The way I envision it is that you'd have a desktop-style Linux system installed on a large SD card. When you insert the card, have it kick off X-nest, then start up a light weight window manager in a chrooted environment (if needed), where everything within that window would follow a standard desktop metaphore (so you could run OpenOffice, full sized Firefox, etc). Then there would be no complaints of missing applications, even if some of the apps aren't suitable for using in palmtap/tablet mode.