Saving .debs on MMC (and copying them from there to a PC hard drive) is the only way you will keep your Maemo device running once the next device appears. The same applies to tarballs. We don't pay for them, but someone has to maintain the repositories they come from, and an older repository needs as much maintenance as the current ones. Particularly when it comes to something like extras-devel or unofficial repositories, it is hardly surprising that packages become unavailable after a time.

I believe the warnings about the red pill and have never used it, but CrashandDie's post is not the way to persuade ewan, who obviously knows what he is writing about. The standard installation procedure is monstrously wasteful of bandwidth. Your package might be single-digit kB, but you first have to download the whole Application List, which for some repositories extends into MB. If you need to restore a backup while travelling somewhere without wifi and roaming data costs 8 cents/kB, you will regret every deletion, even if your device is the latest one.

The answer to ewan is that he doesn't need red-pill mode to do what he wants. If he wants to save a .deb from the Maemo repositories, he can go to http://maemo/org/downloads/ instead of selecting his app from the Application List in Application Manager. When he taps "Install" on the Maemo Download page for his app, another Download Page will appear, giving a choice of "Install", "Save" or "Cancel". He can save the package wherever he wants. Alternatively, he could go directly to the repository on his browser, and download from there. (This may be the only way for Garage apps and other less-official downloads.)

It may be even easier to download the .deb to PC and copy it from there to MMC. It depends on how much searching you have to do to find it.

There seems to be some confusion here. Downloading a .deb to MMC and installing from there doesn't mean you will install it to MMC. Especially, it does not mean that you will subsequently be running the app from MMC. (To anticipate quibbles, we are not talking here about running the rootfs from a media card partition. I gather that that will be unusual, and perhaps impossible, on the N900.) Unless Application Manager has become much less smart for Fremantle, it will install a .deb from MMC to exactly the same place on the rootfs as if the .deb had come directly from the repository.