Well, folks, for 1 I don't use M$ for any of my serious work so I have no comment if you wanna flash from M$ platform.

The key is to charge your N900 for at least a few hours regardless it shows no sign of life or erratic behavior. Just juice it up so that it has enough power to last through the flashing process which is just a few minutes.

On Debian, run a console such as "konsole" or "gnome-terminal". Type "lsusb" you should able to see "Nokia Mobile Phone N900 (Storage Mode)"

The above is to confirm your desktop is able to detect N900 so that the flasher will proceed as expected.

Nonetheless, if you go ahead and run the flasher, it will wait for N900 to be attached before it will carry on with flashing.

If I am not wrong, you have to run "command" on Windoze and flash from there - good luck! Because I don't understand why you would get a linux powered mobile unit (N900) and coupled with something else.