I have been lurking (with an occasional post) for a few weeks since this phone came on my radar. I moved from win xp to ubuntu on both my desktop and laptop and love it.

Now I know the obvious answer to my title. It is full linux. But so is my wireless home linksys router once I reflashed it with with an image from dd-wrt.com. But apart from running some basic commands from the router via ssh, I am not going to learn linux on the router...

And that is really my goal. Not to have a great geek factor phone/tablet, but instead to keep (what little) skills I have developed over the last year fresh when not in front of my computer or laptop. Linux to me has come to mean linux and certain (mostly networking related) apps such as samba, apache, dns, etc. I am just wondering if I get this phone how much of that stuff I can twiddle with or if I will just have the basic functionality that I have on my wireless router.

Finally please clarify the easy-debian package for me. I have read up on it but as a guy trying to become a linux geek and not a geek yet I am having some issues understanding it....Do I have this basically correct?

1) It is an actual install of a full debian to the "hard drive" of the n900 and can run any app that debian on my desktop could (though some horribly slowly)--???

2) chroot means the host maemo kernel is totally in control of running all the debian linux commands as opposed to debian's kernel--???

3) The debian instance is run such that when started it appears to be running on the root of the device, but actually this is a fake root, totally isolated from the important system files in the maemo real file system--???

4) Once the easy-debian program is started, (if above is correct) there should be no boot time for the debian as it is actually being run off the maemo kernel--???

5) The debian kernel is actually not installed as part of the easy-debian/debian chroot program as it is not needed--???

6) Easy debian would then share the host ip information--??? or would it get its own ip address....

7) I could (or could not) have the debian up as a server and use the maemo command line as a client--??? in other words, lets say I set up samba on the debian...can I use from the maemo terminal the samba client commands? or could I setup apache on debian and from the maemo browser actually browse to a webpage created on debian's apache server?

thanks for listening, please newbie down your responses, you linux guru guys (and gals).