Laughingstok: welcome to Maemo. Us geeks have been doing this kind of crap for a few years on the tablets, but the N900 has gone and made geeky sexy.

If you want more Standard Desktop Linux stuff, I suggest installing Easy Debian from the extras-devel repository. This puts an image file with a standard Debian Lenny rootfs in MyDocs and you can easily chroot in and run all of the usual stuff you can get from the Debian repos, including full perl and all the server software. Complex GUI-based apps tend to get pretty mangled by the phone's finger-friendly UI at the moment, but command-line stuff (and simple GUI stuff) works great.

It also seems like a good thread to repost my True Geek's XTerm configuration screenshot: