[HD2 Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting and Genera] curiousGeorge:
No problem. As I suspected, there are two components to the issues I've been having: the first is the card speed, and the second is the available RAM. For the card speed concerns, the "solution" is just to boot it first, wait, reset, then boot it again. As for the RAM, it seems running OpenOffice with GIMP with calculator, etc is a bit too much for the system to handle without swapping... How does haret allocate RAM? Does it clear and allocate the entire 512MB to the OS it's loading? Or does it only give linux access to the "free RAM" not taken up by Windows Mobile?

And yes, I think for space and speed reasons (especially for all the US models which ship with slow cards), SquashFS + UnionFS would be amazing. I've done this with the old Eee PC's (800mhz processor, 512MB RAM, 2GB total storage) and still had well over 1GB left after the compression, and it booted to KDE4 incredibly fast from its painfully slow SSD. All changes the user makes are stored in a small ramdisk and written in a very low-priority background process to a separate partition. Ubuntu can do this by default via "persistence." Pendrivelinux has some excellent tutorials. A full KDE desktop seems to take up fewer resources than the comparative GNOME desktop in recent Ubuntu builds--once many programs are running. Speaking of which, what's the reason for choosing 9.10 "Karmic" over 10.04 LTS, which is optimized for newer ARM processors (ARMv7 and higher)?

Swap can be allocated in the ROM space for the 1024Leo, or even on the SD card. On 16GB SSD media, the wearing concern is not really an issue. The NAND flash chips inside modern SD cards (especially the likes of Sandisk and other non-"budget" cards) is incredibly adept at load balancing, resulting in orders of magnitude less sector wear-down. A lot of the FUD about SSD wear, for instance, have turned out to be practically bogus, and there have been very few cases reported in reality. Since you are now the maintainer of a Linux distro, I thought I'd let you in on that. :)

Eliminating my need to carry around my 15" laptop (also running linux) would be superb, especially since I don't use the phone for as many "phone-specific" functions when I'm at work anyway, and the portability + coolness factor is incredible.

If I had that micro-b usb cable/adapter and USB hub handy (or even proper touchscreen with click support--is it possible to assign a hardware button to left and right click?--along with Ubuntu's screen keyboard), I could try to hammer out an xorg.conf calibration settings sheet, or probe hal xml's to see if I can force it to accept an alternate calibration and actions for "button1, button2" (single tap, tap-and-hold, whatever the driver can interface with).

And yes, you are very correct about GNOME thinking the widget was MIA due to loading times. To test this, on reboot, when the loading was much faster, it popped up properly. Gosh, GNOME... (to think, KDE4.5 can do anything, and comes with "touch friendly" optimizations that can be turned on and off at will to enable or disable a "netbook-remix" interface that works very well on phones). Speaking of which, has anyone figured out a way to perform on-the-fly screen rotation? The method used by "Golden X1buntu" and the like is very tacky and involves boot/init scripts requiring a reboot (plus you can't toggle it from within the OS).