If only untarring johnx's Debian was all that was necessary to "change the operating system on the N8x0".

I have not seen a how-to or announcement by anyone satisfactorily running an alternate operating system on the N8x0 yet. Johnx himself admits that his system is very incomplete and not really designed for end-users.

The only information I've been able to find about running Debian chroot could only suggest using VNC viewer to access apps in the chroot, and that meant running two X servers and two WMs, which caused a big performance hit. Also, that method did not expose any of the tablet's hardware to the chroot's applications.

So, I would argue that there isn't really any way to "change the operating system on the N8x0". My method is a decent simulation of that, but it's still reliant on the Nokia OS.