So.. I've been playing around with easy debian on my n810 for a few days now, trying to breathe some new life into this old device that's been becoming boring. I thought I'd share some of my successes and failures with it.

As for what versions of things I'm using, the easy-debian-whatever package from extras, and the latest debian-squeeze-rootfs from qole's site.

The geometry I decided on is:

(Disclaimer: Don't do this unless you know what you are doing!)

Internal flash
- Default maemo install. Nothing special here

2GB Internal "card"
- 256MB swap partition
- 1.6GB ext2 partition - debian rootfs lives here

8GB External card
- 8GB ext3 partition - for user files

I've read it's recommended to have at least some vfat on the drives, but I don't really see the point, as long as /etc/fstab is set up correctly.

That said, I've noticed a few quirks:
- The external card sometimes auto-mounts to both /media/mmc1 and /media/mmc2. Is there some auto-mounting service that should be disabled in this case?
- The swap partition is not turned on automatically, despite being in fstab. The easy way around it is to just run 'swapon /dev/mmcblk0p1' at bootup. Surely I'm missing something obvious here..

What works:
- Debian chroots extremely fast.
- LXDE is almost faster than the default maemo desktop.
- Pretty much everything I haven't mentioned.
- Obviously, the big apps (GIMP, iceweasel, openoffice) are a bit slow, but tolerable.

What doesn't work, but doesn't really matter:
- Synaptic is slow/hangs/just plain doesn't work. Not really a big deal to just use apt-get instead.
- Have not yet tried sound. Maemo-mplayer is reportedly faster/better, so easy to still use that or something like Canola for media playing.

What doesn't work at all:
- The Fn key does not work in debian. using 'Set Debian HW Keys' seems to have no effect. Is there a hack around this?
- Switch-lxde is really outdated. I've tried doing a simple mount /usr/bin /debian/usr/local/bin, but most apps just throw errors. Is there another clever way to make maemo apps work within the debian chroot (particularly maemo-mapper)?
- Flash in iceweasel does work, but youtube videos don't play properly. Originally I thought "I'll just upgrade flash", but then remembered this is arm, not x86.

My todo list:
- find statusbar app(s) for things like network and battery status (any recommendations here?).
- Try sound. gnome-alsa-mixer at least appears to work.
- Try different window managers (any tips on this?).
- The easy-debian chroot method should work with any rootfs distro for arm. Try some (xubuntu? mer?).
- Get USB host mode to *actually* work in both maemo and debian. Being able to mount an external drive would be very cool (yes I know the onboard usb has very low power output).

Things that would be nice, but are a little unrealistic:
- See if the onboard camera works in debian (any recommended apps to test this with?)
- Get that cool status/notification LED to work from within debian. I think there were actually some pretty low-level scripts for the led at one point?


It may sound like I'm running into lots of little troubles, but so far I'm very happy and impressed at how well this works overall.