What class SD card are you using? Mine is class 2

I have done some dd bs=4096 of=/dev/null and the SD card is slower than the internal 32GB.

Hey qole, thanks much, I've been running a chroot based on your image for about a week now.

Last night I even managed to compile and run GemRB/bg2 from the chroot.

I tried for quite a few hours last night to get sound working from the chroot. Thought it would be quite trivial given that the entire sound system is pulseaudio based. But could not for the life of me get the chroot to connect over tcp or unix sockets

This is probably the first instance where an aspect of the n900 feels crippled to me in some way (pulseaudio).

Thanks again, hope you or someone else can solve the audio dillema

Yes that's true. Though, I remind that initially the N8X0 had similar problems; then when the UI size was decreased to the minimum (80%), all dialogs fitted into the screen. The new device has similar resolution so it should allocate the dialogs the same way.
In order to do that, we should get rid of the title bar. Maybe through wmctrl? I'll go on trying. And, we should "free" the dialog postion on the screen - but this seems much more difficult
By now, the thing that bothers me more is the extreme slowness and unresponsivity of the program. Do you have any hint to the reason, Alan? I tried to renice the running process but with no luck.

go1dfish: I don't know either. I couldn't figure what the magic pulseaudio settings are. We probably have to copy some N900-specific plugins or files to the chroot...

debernardis: I don't know why OpenOffice is slow either. Unlike others, my "Class 6" microSD partition seems terribly terribly slow... And there's no turbo loop for Fremantle, so that's slow too.

I suspect there is something slowing it. Data I/O from the SD partition can't explain while it is totally unresponsive in text entry, in comparison to what we got on the N8X0: so, there must be perhaps some kind of mechanism "nicing" the app; or allocating too low a memory for the application to work.

EDIT:
After some time openoffice writer seems to settle and become more responsive, almost like on the N8x0. I still have no clue on the reasons of such slugginess, though I suspect that much of the app code is swapped and this could be the culprit.
Being able to work, I could modify some properties and get a more manageable screen, like in the attached screenshot.
Modal dialogs are still a problem, though less because their font has been reduced. We need a way to move modal windows and reduce the height of the title bar.
Wmctrl did its job of maximizing the window; now we need a key combo to do that and a daemon which listens for it. Maybe those for easy debian will work?

Also, another problem, at least in my hands, is that the screen seems insensitive to the stylus pressure in an area about 1 mm around its edge, so the cursor can't reach those widgets that approach it closely. Is this a common problem, or it's just my device? I did screen calibration but nothing seems to change.

Is it possible to install apps directly from the debian repository?
I want to use Inkscape, Audacity, pcmanfm and kile...
I think the image-filesystem is to slow, but there should be enough space on the 2GB-partition to handle the installations.

There are 3 possible solutions for the "misplaced directory/partition"-problem:
1. use the 2GB-partition as root-dir(/) after reading files needed to boot)
2. move and symlink all the installed files to the 2GB-partition
3. move and symlink the /usr-directory to the 2GB-partition (moving the files needed to boot to another directory and change the links)

What do you think?

Sorry for cross posting, but I thought that someone interested in this thread knows the solution to my problem, and besides it's possibly related to easy debian on the n900.

As I have described in this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...610#post427610, I have all of a sudden lost the ability to connect to the internet. I can connect to my wifi router, and I can also establish a 3G/3.5G connection, but I cannot ping any address nor open any webpages.

Somehow it seems related to my easy debian install, cause if I try "debbi ping google.com" everything works (as opposed to "ping google.com" which gives me an error message).

I have tried rebooting several times, changing the connection, and unmountung the debian system, but without result. I can only connect to the internet through easy debian.

I should also mention that I can make skype calls, so perhaps some port is blocked?

I really hope some of you gurus out there can help me out

EDIT: SORRY, nevermind. It turned out to be a problem related to wrong info in /etc/resolv.conf on the base system (caused by vpnc)

installing aps.

yes it is possible to install all apps from the debian repositories.
i enlarged the file to 2GB and installed:

- tuxpaint, gcompris (children-games)
- abiword (word-processor like openoffice-writer) only fast and responsive
- gnumeric (spreadsheet like openoffice-calc. very fast)
- artsofillusion (3d-modeller in java) very slow/doesn't fit into the
standard-screen. workaround: vncserver/viewer

openoffice-writer got usable after disabling the dictionary/auto-correction.

gnumeric: on non-english-keyboards you can't use cursor-up/down, because of the combined meta-key which is wrongly interpreted by gnumeric.

I can confirm that. after turning that off the initial sluggishness was gone.

Another thing that works great is amule. especially when ICH and encryption is disabled.

Good news!

Thanks to qobi's little utility, I've started moving forward on getting Xephyr working!

I should have a new image ready before Christmas with a Fremantle-friendly desktop for apps that don't work well in Maemo-5!

Rejoice, desktop app lovers!

(also, thanks for the tips about turning off spell-checking, that will help a lot)