Installation problem was the format on the card. Really strange -- I used cfdisk to make a new FAT32 partition, then mkfs.vfat to make a FAT32 file system.

Xubuntu saw the card, automounted it, copied files, etc. But when I redid the cfdisk, partition was missing. No matter how often I remade it, I couldn't keep a partition table.

But the SD card would work, appear in the file manager, mount, unmount etc. It even showed up as an exported Hard Disk when I connected the Q7 to my laptop via USB.

Weird.

Anyway, can't mount an SD card via my built-in card-reader to my Virtual Machine of Win2k to format it in Windows. What to do?

Answer: format the card in my digital camera, then ditch the folders. Voila.

Anyhow, once that was over with, Mer installed fine.

So far, it's alright. I've never loved Hildon. And Midori hangs on gmail -- just chokes. Probably because there's only 128 MB of RAM, I guess. Looking forward to the Tear browser -- I've heard good things.

I'll keep trying it out though. I'd like to pop more of the GPE environment on there. I assume it's not using GDM or the equivalent -- how is login managed?

Thanks for the suggestions; and thanks for Mer.

m a r