Thank you, sulu. I will probably start a thread in the N900 or Fremantle forum, as some things are a little puzzling.

Your experience with that flash medium is illustrative, thanks.

Everything seems to be working fine, however, so I will experiment further with my setup for now. This problem that I had with my N900 made me do some reading, and I realize now that I want to minimize the use of FAT32 in my N900. The swap of MyDocs and /home was an alternative I thought about. I also thought about just converting MyDocs to ext3 altogether, but because of the assumptions made by the N900 startup script machinery some hacking I'm not comfortable with at this point is involved.

During my first firmware flash attempt I experimented. Converting MyDocs to ext3 will boot the N900, but it will do so in a very bizarre state, as the N900 will mount it as /home/opt, so all image resources like backgrounds, icons, fonts, etc will show as big "missing image" placeholders. Converting MyDocs to ext2 instead results in the dreaded reboot loop.

Regarding using ED in a dedicated partition vs a file image, is there no performance incentive whatsoever to using it in its own partition?

One of the reasons I decided to go with 2 additional ext3 partitions for Easy Debian is that after the problems I had, I don't like the idea of an ext3 image hosted in a FAT32 partition, as I think it can result in problems with the image itself when corruption in the host partition takes place (just a theory).

I am already running Easy Debian from one of the dedicated 7GB partitions, and so far so good!