Like many, I am newly drawn to the maemo world by the promise of the N900. I've been using windows mobile on pdas (hp ipaq hx4700 and htc athena) for several years to approximate a pocketable laptop with pretty good success, but am very intrigued by the power, near-full internet experience, and (I hope) ability to run desktop class software with the N900.

It is the last point that I'm hoping to find clarification on from the community. From what I've found in the forums and youtube, easy debian has been used on the previous tablets to allow running any arm-based debian apps. Is that right? If so, besides slow startup times and the ui not being optimized for the small screen, are there any other limitations?

More basically, what exactly is easy debian? Does Maemo see it as an app that would show up on the task manager view? Can I easily get in and out of easy debian (without having to quit say, OpenOffice) to answer a phone call or do something in a Maemo native app? If I had a hyperlink to a webpage within a Freemind map, would it invoke the N900's browser?

I'm most interested in Freemind and either OpenOffice or full KOffice and Dropbox (and, possibly GIMP). Is it reasonable to assume that I could get all of these running on the N900, either through easy debian or some other method I'm not aware of?

Will easy debian likely be working on Maemo 5 at or near launch of the N900? (I saw somewhere in the forum, but can't find now, where someone had tried it on their early release version and found it extremely slow.)

Thanks very much for any clarification you can provide to this noob.

Thank you, I fully share your thoughts on this topic. A few days ago I found the information (cannot remember where) that the details regarding the koffice package on the n900 shall be announced 9 October. To me this is absolutely crucial information because the n900, as appealing as it is in general, will only do its job for me with an appropriate MS word compatible text processor (not only reader) included.

wow is this all! i was too needing help for this actually!