Here's a post listing a bunch of services you can shut down to get more memory and speed stuff up. If you're only interested in running Debian apps, there are probably a lot of things on this list you can kill. If you want to run Maemo apps, you have to pick and choose a little more carefully. It is probably worth doing some trial-and-error and reporting to this thread on your results. If we can get a safe list of services to stop that will improve things, I'll add it to a new version and release it.

Just a note; our Debian chroot apps depend on some of these services, too. For instance, if you use bluetooth, you don't want to kill btcond, obexsrv or bluez-utils. If you use Maemo Mapper, you probably don't want to kill libgpsbt or gpsdriver. And you almost certainly don't want to kill esd if you use audio, since Debian audio depends on it too.