[HD2 Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting and Genera] dcordes:
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?

=>HaRET flushes the entire windows mobile stuff and remaps it. We don't use the full RAM at the moment. I didn't try but should be visible via cat /proc/meminfo

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.

=> Sounds good I will read up in it and give this a try!

A full KDE desktop seems to take up fewer resources than the comparative GNOME desktop in recent Ubuntu builds--once many programs are running.

=> Maybe dual release with gnome & kde if you can help setting kde up.

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)?

=> Out of pure lazyness. I am running 9.10 on my laptop and the rootstock (deboostrap equivalent) wouldn't let me setup a rootfs with 10.04 version.

I didn't know it had the optimizations.. Even makes use of thumb2 and neon flags 'for multimedia packages' :) So it seems I can get rid of my custom mplayer in 10.04. v0.2 will be lucid lynx !

Swap can be allocated in the ROM space for the 1024Leo, or even on the SD card ...

=> problem is we don't have the nand driver setup yet and since you must be able to mount the filesystem containing the rootfs (file) we can't use that yet. I will definitely try out the squashfs/unionfs thing!

..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).

=> as I said I would welcome it a lot to have another look at that. I also thought about using a keypad button as right click modifier

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).

=> I've seen lucid lynx has such interface need to try this.

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).

=> That's an interesting thing to look in as well. I am not sure if xorg-video-fbdev driver can handle rotation without restarting Xorg. But I'm sure xf86-video-msm drivercan. I am still working on getting it up.. As an interim solution one could create a shortcut to write rotated Xorg.conf and restart X

thanks again for the additional ideas! By now you are at least co-maintainer ^^ I will try to make a writeup of everything in the wiki.