Hi titan and yoush,
I thought I should take a second here and chime in. Seeing as you registered here in October and December and don't seem to be big IRC users, you might not have caught the early days of the mer project and where it evolved from. Back in January 2008 or so I was trying to bring some debian packages to the Maemo 4 (I don't even remember which ones) and got totally fed up with scratchbox and ancient package versions. So I decided I should just take advantage of the bootmenu utility and load a basic Debian root off of the SD card. After a couple weeks worth of evenings I had Debian booting into X11. Almost none of the N800's hardware worked. No wifi, no sound, no battery measurement. So I figured the next logical thing to do was bring hildon up inside Debian. I found out that the pkg-maemo guys had already made a good start, but to make a long story short, their version of hildon wasn't exactly the same as the Nokia-supplied Maemo 4 hildon.

It turns out that to make hildon work the way it does, Nokia actually patches gtk+ and glib, and their patches don't apply to (and in some cases conflict with) later version of gtk+, specifically the version that was used in the then-current Debian release. So i hit an impasse: Basically I could have hildon apps installed or debian gtk+ apps but not both. That was pretty much the first roadblock, but really it was just the first of many. Nokia has patched *a lot* of the free apps and libs they use to improve power management or to support their hildon stack in some way. At the very least you have some massive amounts of repackaging and recompiling ahead of you. And keep in mind that as you work on your "fork" of Maemo 5, Nokia will be working on theirs, quietly diverging from where you are.

So, that was debian for N8x0 and deblet. After that Stskeeps and I decided to try and walk the middle road as best we could, using an ubuntu structure, and repackaging Maemo source packages as necessary to work in Ubuntu. it meant we'd be going the Maemo route and would make us (at least at first) unable to use any GNOME apps. It actually worked out pretty well for a while, but it's an absolutely huge undertaking, and you won't find a lot of people with the combination of the knowledge, time and energy to help. I know that I got burned out from it a couple months ago.

So, I'll close by wishing you the best of luck, and offering to try and answer questions you have (I'll subscribe to this thread, so please don't PM me) so you don't end up sinking as much time as I did into making mistakes and walking down dead-ends. For myself, I think I'm going to try and get involved in Meego.

-John