That's exactly what I did now. But since not everybody uses the same packages I think a more minimalistic approach would be reasonable for the future.

Don't get me wrong, Easy Debian is a great peace of software (actually it was an important reason for me to buy the N900) and having Openoffice, Gimp and Java in the image is a great tech demo, but I think it's a little overkill for everyday life with a Cortex A8 on a slow flash drive.

Basically this is what I changed so far:
- replaced openoffice with abiword and gnumeric (I doubt that I'll ever need them, but who knows. And they are much lighter than openoffice)
- removed gimp, java and epiphany-browser

installed:
- mc
- geeqie (great image viewer)
- mplayer (no idea so far how useful it can be but some -lavdopts options produce quite promising results in combination with -ov sdl)

mplayer-gui unfortunately doesn't work, the window contents aren't displayed. I suspect some problem in connection with xephyr.

I also noticed that one should be very careful when updating packages. Since lenny and squeeze are in the sources.list, one could easily and accidentally do a half done dist-upgrade by installing additional software. This is dangerous because upgrading libncurses5 (dependency of mplayer) breaks the Easy Debian image and the easy-deb-chroot package in maemo. But I guess this problem will be gone with the first image that is totally based on squeeze.