please note that one of the absolute axioms of this project is: we can do it because we already have a "protoboard" called GTA04 we know how to build, that is already very very close to N900 (NOT N9, NOT any cutting edge competing with galaxy 96). We're not aiming at bazillionth single board system ala rPi, we're not inventing a new phone and then find a matching OS for it or even create a new OS.

The GTA04 fits into N900 case and is already similar to N900 hw. We will slightly augment it and give it more ooomph where we can do. Then we're going to sell those devices to a community that's interested in extending the lifespan of their OS which happens to be maemo. We can't tell that community to pretty please now port ubuntu to our new leete device which happens to look like N900 but is something completely different inside, with latest cheap SoC from Samsung or whatever.
I thought I made all those points clear already in previous posts of this thread, but obviously they need to get stated again, more clearly.

Community task force are planning to port fremantle to Neo900 since what we have in maemo community is maemo fremantle OS and that's known to work kinda stable and power-economically on a platform like N900 or GTA04. And for fremantle all the urgently needed apps like dialer etc and all the middleware is existing and working, albeit much of it closed source. We're going to change that long term (buzzword "freemantle" - I don't like the name) - see CSSU - but for sure we're not doing anything like "rebasing fremantle on debian" or whatever weird other ideas might come up. Nobody is going to accomplish such task in any reasonable time frame, so the project would already be doomed from beginning. And no, you definitely can't port maemo harmattan to the Neo900 and expect a working usable pocket computer with pretty good phone capabilities.

If you want a rebased-on-whatever-OSwhatever, on bleeding edge hw platform available for 250EUR, go ahead and pick any arbitrary existing hardware available out there and port the OS of your dreams to it. You don't need neither GolDeliCo and GTA04 nor the N900 case for that, though you're of course free and highly welcome to buy a Neo900 and do to it whatever you like :-) And you get all the docs to empower you to do so. There's no such thing like "locked into freemantel's [fremantle(!)] aging repo's" on Neo900. If you want to use debian bleeding edge, just go ahead. there's a lot of alternative distros that get ported to Neo900 pretty quickly and some are already ported to N900.

cheers
jOERG