Yes i had a similar problem. After trying many different alternative solutions i got it booting with a sd-cards 2nd partition with permissions as following: owner root, group "users" may write and read files.

I guess it's more to do with the permissions than the partition, because my cloned OS rsynced to a partition with only root access won't boot. And i set the permissions after repartitioning the sd-card, before untarring the Debian to the disk.

I got my bt-phone paired by right-clicking the bt-icon on the upper right corner (same as in ubuntu). But i was disappointed, that only sound-tools were installed in the base system (no idea if the gnome-obex-fs is even compiled to armel).

I tried boot from the internal one after doing chmod 777 and chown -R root on it, and it stuck at "Booting from mmc2 (mmcblk0p1 ext2)..." for around 20 seconds and then it just shut up and started booting up again.
While doing chown, it output "chown: /mmc2/bin/nc: No such file or directory" for a bunch of stuff, even though they are there.
The N800 no longer boots up from flash, so I'll have to restore it. (nothing of value was lost)

Did you watch the boot messages? You may need to do a fsck on the SD filesystem. I did.

If it's not booting, I know it's mmc3 for me, not mmc2.

HTH

There weren't any boot messages, it just shut down after staying on "it's booting" screen for a while.

Try the mmc2 vs mmc3 thing.

I also use /dev/mmcblk0p1 and not /dev/mmcblk1p1, FWIW.

I had a lot of trial and error with this as well.

EDIT: It's actually crypto_algapi that fails to modprobe, and its md5sum checks out as well. I'd like to hear from anybody who has WEP working (I know I'm repeating myself and that I should just move to WPA2, but still).

Sorry guys. I've been busy for the last couple days with work and having a friend visiting from out of town. I'll just take a second to get back to the people having WEP problems:
I can confirm that arc4 isn't loading, but I'm somewhat confused because arc4 isn't even included in the modules that come with OS2008. A custom kernel may need to be compiled or possibly just modules that include the missing crpyto symbols. I'll add more info as I figure it out.

As for booting from SD card, here's a couple general notes: I believe that the first partition of the internal card is generally considered mmc2 and the first partition of the external card is usually mmc1. Other than that the names aren't really official. Also, if you're using ext3, remember to include jbd in the list of modules to load. I assume that module provides journalling support.

General note on untarring Debian: Many Linux distros and Mac OSX as well tend to mount removable ext2/3 media like SD cards with nosuid and nodev. If you're having problems untarring Debian or having problems with it not booting, reformat the card, mount it on your desktop and run "mount" from the command line. If it includes the words nosuid and/or nodev in the line for the Sd card then you will need to run:
After that, run mount again to check and try untarring again. It should work this time. Also, I'll say it again: You must untar it as root. Untarring as user and trying to fix the permissions afterwards is not likely to work.

Again, sorry I haven't been of more help lately. I must say I'm really happy to see all of you giving this a try and helping each other. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a bit more time answering questions in a couple days, and if no one has gotten arc4 and supporting modules figured out in the next couple days I should be able to give that a shot as well.

-John

I had problems getting WEP to work until I copied /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools to /etc/network/if-up.d/
Seems to work OK now if I restart the dhcp client after bringing up the wireless. (it's like the wireless-tools were running before the modules got loaded - perhaps it would work with a sleep 10 somewhere in the script...)

Hmm... No good.

@JohnX: If arc4 isn't necessary for WEP, I don't need it. I had read somewhere that it was connected to WEP issues at some point, and made the connection, right or wrong, to this.

I just need WEP working.

I think every log (syslogd, klogd, bootlogd) daemon should be disabled, like in EEE PC, because of flash drive's write limit.

And, there are many programs that are removed, but configuration files are keeped. They should be removed.