I'm using the planet computers debian-based "gemian" distro because it has all the cellular packages preinstalled. The device comes with android, and planet has instructions at their site about how to download and install gemian, it was extremely easy.

As for loading other distros, i opened the flashing scripts and all it does is use dd to flash the main filesystem partition and boot partition from the sd card to the device internal storage.

Now that ive got lightdm and mate configured the way I like i'm going to backup this filesystem so I can reflash back to this.

I can try other distros if you can point me to the images. I tried flashing maemo leste but not sure what to use for the boot partition.