Thanks, Benson. I installed osso...unlocked, which involved upgrading about 18M of other files. No damage done, so I'm happy with that.

I removed the script that I'd tinkered with and reinstalled a fresh version. After setting the .conf up, I ran the script. This time I did get noticed that the keyboard was detected.

However, I still get nothing when I type on the keyboard. I think *some* keypresses are sent to the N800, but they may not be mapped correctly. I never see letters in a text box, but I did discover that when I closed the keyboard up, I saw buttons in applications selecting themselves, spaces appearing at weird intervals, and so on -- almost as if somebody had mashed their hands on all the keys at once and lots of random junk was coming through. Never letters, though. Just spaces. Hitting the space bar myself does not produce a space in a text box.

Closing up the keyboard now, I cannot replicate the problem. It may have been a fluke elsewhere.