awesome, I finally have a solution, thank you so much!

I think I will wait a day to see if something comes up in these forums: http://forum.cyanogenmod.org/
just because they are using more devices than just the N900/N9. The n900 seems ok, but it is a bit old and still expensive.

Do you know about the cyanogenmod project? It seems to be a really active forum with ~20 different devices that have been hacked. For some reason no one is biting on my questions tho.