I don't believe that your Canola problems are related to the Debian install. My install makes only two changes to your system, and they are undone when you uninstall the package. If Debian has any impact on your system (you start the print daemon running, for example), a reboot will set everything back to "normal".

Also, fatalsaint, I would suggest partitioning your card to give yourself a big 3+ GB Debian partition, then setting up your chroot there before you do much more hacking. You'll get noticeably better speed and you won't have to worry about resizing your image file.

Also, if you are planning to boot to Debian, don't use my chroot as the basis for your install, use Johnx's bootable Debian.