I will take a few of these one when I get a chance.

For backup software I have used Flyback a couple of times and it works OK. We should make a deb of it. You want an external USB device to backup to.

For sound you want the files libesd0 and osso-esd .. they are older versions and they conflict with a newer version required by some other software on the deblet.. so you need to 'force' install them. You also will need libosso1 available in the debian repo's. I do not know the licensing issues with the maemo packages.. maybe we can build our own deblet packages that includes both of those and somehow gets around the "conflicting file" warning?

As I have time to look at these and others in the list more I'll update this post.

(b-man.. I recommend you work with qole if you guys are working on similar projects .. 2 heads is better than 1 and all that.. and no need for parallel projects on something this small).