I decided to abandon the boot-to-Debian approach for a while, and go back to the chroot-to-Debian approach (using your config). This way, I can do stuff on-tablet, and my wireless lan and bluetooth keyboard both work.

I changed the /etc/apt/sources.list, because the Debian ARMEL project has become official! So I added in:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian sid main
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian lenny main

Now an apt-get dist-upgrade gives me 247 packages to upgrade! Woot!

Ok, so to take the next version from "proof of concept" to "usable by geeks", I think you need to:

(1) Figure out a way to copy the user's maemo wireless lan and bluetooth settings, or at least write a how-to for us non-uber-geek types. I want to be able to have a wireless connection and a bluetooth keyboard (or an on-tablet way of bringing them up) when I boot to Debian.

(2) Boot to a command line, start a more complete WM (XFCE4) upon boot, or give a basic text menu to choose what WM to boot to. (I wonder if we could get the Ubuntu Mobile interface running on top of Debian?) The current bare-bones Hildon / matchbox interface isn't very useful. Most, if not all, of the Debian apps are not hildonized, so we should be starting a WM that won't mangle their interfaces.

(3) Install GIMP by default. I hear it runs well on the tablet.