What does "working video" mean?! You mean a video player? If so, use the maemo mplayer, it is nicely optimized for the tablets... but I don't think that's what you mean...

And you would be able to keep maemo, but it would be on a MMC card.

JFFS2 does a great job of compressing everything; I got a 1GB rootfs down to 512MB using the above method. So you don't need to keep it under 256, but, if my experience is typical, you do need to keep it under approx. 512MB.

You could also use some sort of filesystem extension method to give yourself a bit of extra space...

You've gotten the maemo mplayer to "just work" in Deblet with full screen support, sound, and all and you haven't told us how yet?

Another problem I see is that you could never distribute the rootfs because Deblet steals closed source and proprietary stuff from maemo when it installs.. so distributing a tar'd up package of those binaries would be illegal I think... (right stskeeps?)

I think 'maemo mplayer' != 'maemo video player'.

Well true.. mplayer is what I meant.. but I updated my post to fix the confusion.

The maemo "mplayer" doesn't 'just work' for me perfectly without modifications.. and even then I can't get full screen to work. So if qole has done this in a booted deblet, and not in an Easy Debian setup, which is what would be required for a flashed deblet rootfs... then I would like to know how.

Sorry fatalsaint, didn't see your new thread about getting mplayer working in booted Deblet. My passion just doesn't lie in the bootable-Debian direction; I'm not going to be much use to those of you who are trying to get those last pieces in place.

And I don't think we'd be talking about distributing this rootfs image. After all, the whole philosophy of Deblet is to build it all from scratch with an installer. If you want to automate the process, you could add the fanoush steps at the end of the install, turning the new Deblet rootfs into a flashable image, which you then can flash to your device. Or perhaps you could make an empty jffs2 image file, mount it, and build the Deblet rootfs inside.

Some more to the speed up booting thread, and I think I'm starting to reach the max of what's possible. This is:

dash as /bin/sh, CONCURRENCY=startpar, insserv doing ordering of scripts, moving the rootfs mounting to the background way before init runs. 50-55 seconds. Maemo is 45 in comparison.

bootchart is at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~cvm/bootchart.early-jffs.png

So, my question is, - add a really complicated solution to get the "normal" Deblet 60 second boot time down to 45 seconds, or leave it be that it's "good enough"?

Faster is always better, but honestly I wouldn't stress about it too much- for power consumption reasons it's probably best not to shut down and restart all the time, and overall deblet seems to be stable enough that frequent reboots shouldn't be required either.
If I had more free time (and skill), I'd be spending it working on power conservation, gps and DUN support, and maybe speed optimizations for specific apps (a faster browser would be nice, and there's been some chatter about media players and such). Bluetooth DUN and maemo-mapper (well, and a key/screen lock) are the two things that keep me from running deblet full time at this point; if we could get those 'killer apps' to work then people wouldn't really need to boot back and forth.

Some more Deblet videos.. something I'm working on - Deblet Rescue Menu. Touch a key during startup and it will allow you to select what rescue options to use.

See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h24f2YjzWBE

Just while I remember.. http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libts-bin contains a ts_calibrate which will calibrate the touchscreen for you. It needs export TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/event3 , fb_update_mode auto as it uses framebuffer.