I am happy to report that misiak's experiment was successful (the alarm fired) and that, despite vi_'s warning my Nokia Suite was still working. (Thanks for the warning BTW, I would not have tried otherwise as I never use it.)

What is not working so well is eggtimer. It triggered but now refuses to shut up, even after booting to console in bootmenu and deleting the eggtimer binary manually. I doubt it is related though. It may never have worked: this is the first time ever I have actually let it trigger.