rolfok!

U da man! ... and also everyone else, in this thread and elsewhere, who helped me.
"I stand on the shoulders of giants".

Your hint, combined with careful re-reading of the entire thread, has resulted in almost 100% sucess. I'm taking notes and will turn this all into a wiki 'noob kismet install'...



Installed, runs, just one minor error the first time I ran it:

FATAL: Dump file error: Unable to open dump file /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.dump (No such file or directory)

I also noticed that it did not produce any of the output files, even though it claimed to be writing them. There was no /media/mmc1/kismet directory. So, I manually created it and tried again, and this time I was rewarded with the real time Kismet screen in xterm!

Here's the lines from xterm, from install, to running:

Nokia-N810-51-3:/media/mmc1/download# dpkg -i nokismet-0.0.1a.deb
Selecting previously deselected package nokismet.
(Reading database ... 19195 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking nokismet (from nokismet-0.0.1a.deb) ...
Setting up nokismet (0.0.1a) ...
Nokia-N810-51-3:/media/mmc1/download# cd /
Nokia-N810-51-3:/# kismet
Launching kismet_server: /usr/bin/kismet_server
Will drop privs to user (29999) gid 29999
Enabling GPS position lock override (broken GPS unit reports 0 always)
No specific sources given to be enabled, all will be enabled.
Non-RFMon VAPs will be destroyed on multi-vap interfaces (ie, madwifi-ng)
Enabling channel hopping.
Enabling channel splitting.
Source 0 (wlan): Enabling monitor mode for nokia770 source interface wlan0 channel 6...
Source 0 (wlan): Opening nokia770 source interface wlan0...
Spawned channel control process 2195
Dropped privs to user (29999) gid 29999
Allowing clients to fetch WEP keys.
configdir '/home/user/.kismet/' does not exist, making it.
SSID cloak file did not exist, it will be created.
IP track file did not exist, it will be created.
Logging networks to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.network
Logging networks in CSV format to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.csv
Logging networks in XML format to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.xml
Logging cryptographically weak packets to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.weak
Logging cisco product information to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.cisco
Logging gps coordinates to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.gps
Logging data to /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.dump
Writing data files to disk every 300 seconds.
Mangling encrypted and fuzzy data packets.
Tracking probe responses and associating probe networks.
Reading AP manufacturer data and defaults from /usr/etc/ap_manuf
Reading client manufacturer data and defaults from /usr/etc/client_manuf
Using network-classifier based data encryption detection
Not tracking duplicate IVs
FATAL: Dump file error: Unable to open dump file /media/mmc1/kismet/Kismet-Jun-24-2008-1.dump (No such file or directory)
Sending termination request to channel control child 2195...
Waiting for channel control child 2195 to exit...
WARNING: Sometimes cards don't always come out of monitor mode
cleanly. If your card is not fully working, you may need to
restart or reconfigure it for normal operation.
Kismet exiting.
Done.
Nokia-N810-51-3:/#