Ahhh, cool, thanks! ...I was afraid the flasher for the N800 was like the firmware updaters for the Danger Hiptop or HTC devices. Seeing the flasher-3.0 for Linux, I didn't want to have to rebuild everything if I updated the firmware. Knowing that I'll have to sooner or later, I've created a /mmc/mmc1/packages folder for keeping everything I install to the N800.

Thanks for the help with ssh keygen for user and for pointing me to the becomeroot package. I grabbed becomeroot directly from:
http://eko.one.pl/maemo/dists/mistra....1-2_armel.deb
...installed it as a local file from App Manager, then went into XTerm and successfully "sudo gainroot"

Thanks for the help! I'm really impressed. The N770/N800 has a great user/developer community, much better than what I saw for the Danger Hiptop SDK. I'm looking forward to jumping into Scratchbox and learning to develop under Hildon soon.