As a quick step to making life easier when mounting USB filesystems (I hate typing more than necessary on that tiny keyboard), I've build pmount for maemo based on debian version 0.9.20, the latest that will work with debhelper version 5. I had to modify it to remove the 'user' option when mounting as this isn't supported by busybox. What this means is that you can simply type (for example):

to create the mountpoint /media/sda1 (or /media/<label> if you specified <label>) and mount /dev/sda1 on it. And similarly

to unmount and destroy the mount point.

To install (I guess if you don't know how to do this then maybe you shouldn't be trying, but really it is very easy), download the attachment to your N900 then type:

then (possibly) reboot the device to reload the user and group information. There may be a smarter way to do this, but it was easier just to reboot.