rebhana: one of the missions of Easy Debian was to make the chroot as "porous" as possible, with as little "sandboxing" as possible. So all sorts of system directories, like /dev and /tmp, get bound to the "real" Maemo ones. This means a surprising number of apps "just work" as if they are being run inside Maemo, but it also means that a Debian app can crash the whole phone or change the behaviour of Maemo apps (positively, like in the case of the Maemo browser working with Debian vpnc, or negatively, like doing an apt-get install of some apps can restart crucial Maemo daemons and crash the phone). In general, however, there are very few things that Debian apps can do that will persist past a reboot.

As for specifically why Debian vpnc works so well? I don't know. I'm really happy that it does, though!

I only wish GConf and pulseaudio worked as well.