I have had my phone about 3 weeks now. I knew about all the "issues" such as not stunning battery, not having thousands of apps, etc from lurking here so none of that bothered me. what did bother me was that I bought the device to have "real" linux in my pocket. I felt that the default maemo shell got close but had too many things misssing for me to learn on (busy box not bash, could not find the less command, could not install services such as sendmail, apache, bla bla bla).

Well a little more investigation and I downloaded easy debian. I am not using it for any of the graphical apps it can bring to the n900, just to learn the command line.

I hate sitting at my home computer to learn and the easy debian is perfect. after a remapping things on my hardware keyboard and the little strip on the bottom of x terminal, I am starting to learn perl on it, have written a few bash shell scripts, tinkered with basic mysql commands, and learned the basics of dpkg and apt-get apt-cache. I have even gotten a few updates for easy debian via apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, and nothing broke.

So I just wanted again to thank those who put the time in to make this available. There is no way at my skill level I could figure out how to get an arm based distro into a chroot on this device.

android may have 50,000 apps and apple 200,000. But do they have "real linux" available? I doubt even a rooted android has enough "real linux" (ie bash, core gnu utils, add on network service such as those in /etc/init.d) to make it worth fiddling with.

So in the future, whatever phone I have will have to have real linux available. This one app spoiled me more then 200,000 rotten apples ever could.

Keep up the good work and again thanks for easy debian.
Without it I would probably just move to android.

Say thanks to Qole. He is da man

oh snap I thought it was a bunch of people...

I guess I can jump into this thread too to give Qole my thanks