how is power management being handled? It seems ACPI isn't present, is this correct? Would it be possible to compile it?

Is it possible to check battery status without ACPI?

Well I had a few hours to try again and get debian loaded. I re-flashed my N800 to the current OS2008 image and installed becomeroot, repartitioned my Internal SD card, mounted SD card, installed initfs and then untar the debian.tar file to my SD card. I rebooted and it worked! Then I mistakenly tapped the rotate screen button and I couldn't shutdown and had to pull the battery. So why wouldn't the system initially boot, well as I started to reinstall all my apps and setup my system again, I realized that I had previously formatted my SD card as ext3 and was trying to mount initfs as ext2, doh! I have had a few corrupt filesystem problems with ext2 so I am attempting to reinstall debian on an ext3 SD filesystem and then try to get chroot working as a user. All this effort, I hope it works as well as I hope it might!

It seems ACPI is not working very well compared to what the default OS is running. The screen is always "on" for example.

I'm having more problems . It semms that i can't load eny kernel modules into my partition. Can you guys help??

here's the errors that came up:

insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1/mbcache.ko
insmod: cannot insert '/mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1/mbcache.ko': File exists (-1): File exists

insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1/ext2.ko
insmod: cannot insert '/mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1/ext2.ko': File exists (-1): File exists

those errors usually mean that the kernel modules are already loaded. I would say those errors are harmless.

THANKS!!!!!! I finally have debain!!! , slow but still usable

Did you put the "debain" (?) and KDE on the same SD boot, would that make my house explode? You mind to share your SD config, i.e., are your SD boot from ext2 or ext3, or does it matter?

I read your previous post, you are using ext2. Would you mind to drop a few note how you do it, start from the very beginning, so that a late comer like bun will have less problem in getting it done, and also benefit yourself in the future if you have to do it on your n910 ?

TIA,

bun

Chroot seems to be working, and I am in process of apt-get abiword and test that out. I setup personal menu to run "/root/debian hilda xclock" script as root and it seems like an easy way to startup an application without going through xterm.
Ext3 seems to be working better than Ext2 on my SD card as it handles improper shutdowns better by having less corruption of the data on the partition. Good for when things don't go as expected.
Qole, is there a way to check if the insmod kernel modules are already loaded in your chroot script?

Also, when I try and run the chroot scripts as user, such as "/usr/bin/debbie hilda xclock" I am asked for a password on the xterm prompt and I have tried rootme and blank and neither seem to work. Am I missing something? Using Personal Menu and running as root gets around this, but would be nice fix.

Having some trouble getting abiword going.
I have run the script /root/debian to put me at a chroot debian prompt. I tried "apt-get install abitword" which started to download the needed files but stopped with an error with not being able to find samba. So I tried to change /etc/apt/sources.list to specify ftp.uk.debian.org as opposed to ftp.jp.debian.org. I then ran "apt-get update" but have this error:
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (20 Not a directory)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

I tried "sudo apt-get update" but this doesn't help either, any ideas how to correct this lock file problem?