Estel & Pichlo - thank you for your advice. I'm downloading Estel image (which I was using previously with great sucess).

Estel - if I understand it corect I should download the image, put it in MyDocs and then remove unwanted software to shrink it? Should I do it with provided synaptics? Which packages to remove to shrink it to about 2,1GB? Libre and Chromium are must. Gimp would be nice If I uninstall the software how to extract everything from the image so I can put it into the partition on sd? Should I do it on my lubuntu with some archive manager?

You may install/uninstall using synaptic, aptitude, or apt-get - it doesn't matter, as long as you're doing it from inside ED. As for which packages, I have no idea, as what is "essential" wary from person to person.

As for extracting image after shrinking it - you may do it all from N900. You need to mount it first, then, you may copy it's content (which imply mounting your to-be debian partition, too. Be sure to close ED chroot, first! Then for example, do:

Now, you should be able to use ED as normal, thanks to .chroot config file pichlo helped you to prepare. What you got, is essentially partition-based ED. Performance may be hurt a little due to having swap on same physical device as ED, but otherwise, it should work fine.

Remember, than any names I used are just mockup - for /tmp/ directory, you may create it with whichever name you want. /dev/mmcblk1p1 assumes, that it is your ext3 partition on SD card - if not, change it accordingly.

OTOH, if you're gonna tell me that you don't have "your-easy-debian-image-file.ext3" on MyDocs, or that "#after copying ends" command return errors, a bunny will die (excuse poor pun, don't take it to the heart).

/Estel

Estel - no bad fealings Will give it a shot.
I thought that ED and swap on SD was a good idea and ti would be faster then on emmc.

It's not the point. In chroot just `mkdir /var/run/pulse`. Does the trick

Well, I used the barebone image, upgraded to squeeze, installed lxde-core and xserver-xephyr (+gnumeric) and now am trying to fire up lxde.

Changed startlxde1 to startlxde in /usr/bin/debian-lxde

But the display is blank. The log is: http://pastebin.com/G9eVGUr1

Any ideas why it's happening?

/edit: is there any squeeze barebone image? there are some problems like fopen on man-db which should be fixed in newer releases

Estel. I ahve tried both as normal user and as root:

Please read on the mount syntax. Particularly this bit:

(ii) When mounting a file system mentioned in fstab, it suffices to give only the device, or only the mount point.

Your image is not in fstab so you need to specify all operands. Try something like this as root for size:

mount -t ext3 /home/user/MyDocs/debian-m5-estel.img.ext3 /.debian

(Assuming /.debian exists and is where you want the image mounted. You can use any directory but I recommend using an empty directory to avoid issues.)

Hmmm I do not know much about commands but correct me if I' wrong:
mkdir /tmp/debian-temp - this makes the folder in tmp just for purpouse of copying
mount /home/user/MyDocs/your-easy-debian-image-file.ext3 - this mounts the image
/tmp/debian-temp - this moves me form / to debian-temp
mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /.debian - this mounts the sd card
cp -a /tmp/debian-temp/* /.debian/ - this is copying files from temp to sd but what files as no command has copied any files to debian-temp?

Nope... It's only one command... same line .

Dang - I thought that this is a new line - it looked like this in Estels post.