Try again with KDE4!
OO has "evolved" too in the meantime.

I still have a similar machine under my desk (AMD K6-2 450MHz, 320MB RAM) and anything beyond a slim Xfce desktop is unuseable. Zenwalk (Xfce) was slow 5 years ago, Slax (KDE3) wasn't even done starting the desktop after 10 minutes.
I'm running a minimal Debian with a minimal LXDE on it which is ok if you're patient, nothing more, nothing less. For office I use Abiword/Gnumeric.

I'd say Easy Debian on my N900 (CSSU stable, 850MHz) has about 1.5 to 2 times the perfomance of this ancient PC.

There's still SHR [1] which dos1 promised to get running on the Neo900. I think it's realistic since it's already running on the N900 [2] (with some constraints).

After having had a look at the SHR UI and some tests with Bodhi I think Debian with the Enlightenment desktop should be quite useable on the Neo900.
My biggest concerns at the moment are the kernel (in terms of power consumtion - my hopes are on freemangordon here), the stability of Enlightenment and the SHR software on Debian and finding suitable end-user software for the tiny screen.


[1] http://www.shr-project.org/trac
[2] http://www.shr-project.org/trac/wiki/Devices/NokiaN900

Oh my ...looking back ... my n8x0's ..there were a few o.s.'s that ran well...alot that almost ran well ...many that needed serious work ...and many that didn't/ couldn't run ...
Comparatively ...as a consequence ...
considering the specs hardware-wise...
and the fact it won't be as closed a system as our Nxx0's...
I have great faith in alt o.s.'s running on the neo.
Scads of choice for working alternatives.

What's the blocker for Maemo on Neo900? The drivers? The closed apps? Maybe a stripped-down version could be created to possibly download the closed content directly from Nokia repos on one's own risk?

+1 to that...
I'm kinda curious myself as to the deets concerning those questions..

I could be completely off the mark but the biggest problem as I see it is the effed-up spagetti mess of dependencies that makes it impossible to separate the Nokia binary blobs from the open-source ones. I asked a number of times to sort out the dependencies and detangle the mess and was always told that it was impossible due to the lack of manpower. That makes me wonder if there is going to be any preinstalled OS at all or if we are going to be left to sort it out on our own.

+1 that...
.Hmm...ya.... the question of the the blob nightmare seems to be the prevalent issue whenever this question is asked.

I get the feeling it would be easier to build from scratch than trying to untangle Nokia's insane "Gordian Knot"...

We have the Jessie image It might be the right direction.

+1 to Jessie.
I have more faith in the neo running such alt. os's ...
Arch should also be promising...amoungst others...

I don't think there will be a problem with preinstalling any legal to redistribute and at least semi usable image that you may choose.

We will probably have some Debian BSP image for testing anyway, and what I said earlier about SHR still holds, so I'm fairly certain that there will be at least those two options available.

If by the time we flash the devices at factory there will be other options already available (for instance, if someone would already port something like Firefox OS using the early prototypes) then I don't see the reason to not offer such image as a preinstall option as well.

But keep in mind that we're not doing any support for the software, so there's no difference between preinstalling some image by us and doing it by yourself as a first thing after receiving the device.

We will however monitor the state of available software and do our best to help where possible - after all, even the greatest hardware platform is worth nothing without any reasonable software running on it - and this is something that was clearly visible back in Openmoko days. That's one of the reasons why we insist so much on N900 compatibility in hw - this way we can benefit from work done for N900, while otherwise we would need much bigger user base in order to even hope about decent software support from community.

the idea is to allow user to install his maemo fremantle system image he owns from his N900, and then install adaption bits over it which replace parts that are not compatible with Neo900, e.g. for the AT interface of modem which relaces the ISI gibberish on BB5 modem of N900.
This obviously is incompatible with "shipping a preinstalled OS with device" - all we can ship with the device for maemo is maybe a script that does the job on user's behalf. We must not ship Nokia (C) blobs, it's up to user to install them to Neo900 after getting them from any legal source ;-)

cheers
jOERG (back from holidays)