I put this together awhile ago for people looking to compile BruceL's interface code which also uses the Mesa engine. I can't guarantee 100% that it will work on a clean tablet, but it should get you going

Here's the steps I took, hopefully they'll save you a couple hours:
1) install the SDK repository
Add a new catalog with the following information:

2) install gcc from said repository
You should be able to do this with
I accidentally did it the hard manual way, tracking down every individual dependency

3) install libsdl1.2, libsdl1.2-dev from this repository
(NOTE: you might have to reinstall libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl1.2 from the repository in step four to make this work, I can't remember)


However, libsdl1.2-dev complained about xlibs-dev. You can get the binary here
download and dpgk -i it... it complains about a bunch of dependencies but will fetch them from the SDK repo

4) add another repository:
install libgl1-mesa-swx11, libglu1-mesa, libgl1-mesa-swx11-dev, and libglu1-mesa-dev.

5) After this I tried to compile it, but gcc complained about not being able to find SDL_net.h. Strangely enough, all the previous iterations of maemo contain libsdl-net1.2 but not maemo 4. Anyway, I grabbed them from the maemo3.2 repo.

libsdl-net1.2 is here
and libsdl-net1.2-dev is here

download them, then install libsdl-net1.2 first, then libsdl-net1.2-dev

From here, you should be able to get SDLgears from http://libsdl.org/opengl/SDLgears-1.0.2.tar.gz and unpack it and run

Again, if it doesn't work (complains about GLX missing or something like that) go download libsdl1.2 and libsdl1.2-dev from http://muksuluuri.ath.cx/maemo/dists/bora/main and install them manually using dpkg -i

Hope this helps you guys, feel free to PM me if there's something wrong with my instructions. I've worked through these steps twice now and I've got gears running at about 18 fps on my tablet with performance mode on.

Enjoy!