It is all actually EABI (armel) even though they say "arm" in the arch field and the .deb filenames.... They plan to make different versions for different arm chips, instead of having one big arm/armel port for everybody like Debian does. They explain it in this presentation: http://mojo.handhelds.org/files/Hand...jo_ELC2008.pdf

Haha, I do enjoy Navi's trolling... But just in case any one is tempted to believe that nonsense, the PDF linked above explains the rationale -- they say Maemo has "~700" packages while Ubuntu has ">10000". And actually, that number is closer to 20000 (and Debian has even more).

So, if Maemo is "Debian based" why can't we use all those packages now? Because the internet tablet OS is not actually in sync with any released distro, so everything needs to be (at the very least) recompiled.

Iirc ITOS2005 had some amount of binary compatibility with Debian's arm port, which made many things usable without recompiling (I'm not sure how much, I only used OS2005 for a few weeks before OS2006 came out). Nokia's ITOS2006 broke this compatibility for a good reason, the switch to EABI (armel). At the time there was no Debian armel. Now, there is, but only in the unstable branch.

In a nutshell: Running a proper distro like Ubuntu or Debian on the tablet (instead of Nokia's "debian-based" ITOS crap) is extremely attractive because the porting effort is shared with those targeting other arm devices, which translates to more software being available (and, kept updated).