What is Nokia Maemo Linux?

From the my mailbag:

A friend of mine was talking about Maemo Linux. Can you explain what is Nokia maemo Linux?

The Nokia N800 Internet tablet is a wireless Internet appliance from Nokia. The N800 was developed as the successor to the Nokia 770. It is designed for:
a] Wireless Internet browsing
b] E-mail functions
c] Includes software such as Internet radio, an RSS news reader, image viewer and media players for selected types of media.

Maemo Linux is used in Nokia N800. It is a development platform for handheld devices. You can think Maemo as a desktop for handled device. It is modified version of Debian Linux. According to project webpage:

Maemo provides an open source development platform for Nokia Internet Tablets and other Linux-based devices. It is build from components widely used in open desktop and mobile systems. We strive to make maemo open, accessible and useful to all developers wanting to squeeze the possibilities of the mobile desktop and the Internet.
The maemo SDK contains the tools needed to create and port integrated applications, replicating the Internet Tablet environment in your PC. The Hildon Application Framework is a good entry point to understand the peculiarities of this platform. A shortcut for you to consider.

This website offers official documentation, tutorials, bug reporting tools and repositories of unstable versions for testing. It also provides services devoted to and maintained by the maemo community: software catalog, project hosting, documentation wiki, Planet news plus mail and IRC support channels.

You can purchase this cool toy N800 at Amazon! I'm going to get one before XMS :D