The N900 in a terminal will look identical to a Desktop based on Debian. The commands such as apt, dpkg, and such all exist on the N900 and it uses the same type of repositories as the Desktop Debian would. The normal commands such as ls, cp, mv, etc are actually from something called "BusyBox" which gives you a "mostly" similar command to the desktop however it may be missing some switches. I haven't messed with dd-wrt, but if it's linux like Android is Linux (just the Kernel, none of the GNU userspace items or SysV boot process) - then the N900 will be more like "linux" (GNU/Linux) than the dd-wrt. For the most part yes. Some may segfault, or just crash, but all the ARM ported software will at least attempt to run. No, chroot just changes your "root" shell to be inside the jail that you specify. So the kernel of Maemo is controlling all the hardware, but the commands themselves are being run from Debian. You are not actually "booting" debian at all, simply running it's binaries to execute commands. (and in turn linking against the debian libraries). It's a real "root" in that it's mostly a full debian root installation, but it's not the active nor running/booted "root". It's what they call a "sandbox" or "jail" - everything within the chroot sees "/" as the "chrooted directory", not the real /, and it runs all commands from that area. This is actually kind of hard for me to explain, hope I didn't confuse you further. Correct. Debian is not actually booting, Maemo is handling all access to the hardware, sound, devices, etc. The software is running from within debian. Correct. The kernel is only used for booting and running the system, easy debian is not meant for that. Deblet (then Mer) for the N8x0 was meant for that and included the debian kernels. It would share the IP of the host. This isn't a full virtual machine because debian is not really "running". Yes but it would look like localhost, or exactly the same as if you setup samba or apache on Maemo. HTH.