i wonder why those lacking features aren't in the repo?

Is it possible to download the files mentioned in those instructions you posted and install afterward? I don't trust my connection to last that long.

The files are downloaded fairly quickly at the beginning. Most of the install time is taken up compiling everything on-tablet.

By the way, I think the next version of Mer should have Tear by default instead of Midori.

Arora is good too

KDE 4.2 on top of Mer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DThOHGb2rr0

I'll take the blame for that. I did my best to get an identical version of e17 to build as debs, and spent a solid 2 weeks making packages but never could get the keyboard to function properly with the packages in the repos. The Mer repo version of e17 also suffers from a weird glitch with colors not being displayed correctly for the background (I played around with different display enginge but never could figure this out completely). Finally, many of the shelf widgets such as the calendar and wlan monitor are in the svn repo separately from the rest and must be built into separate deb packages. I've actually found a way to build the deb and even attempted to build the package with the Mer builder, but the build failed and before I got a chance to fix the package my virtualbox image got messed up with another e17 package I was working on that the extra modules package depended on...so I ended up in a dependency hell. Then, I got frustrated that the 2 weeks of effort had yeilded so little positive results and realized that since a working method existed (albeit not as good of a method), I might as well let people use that other method for a while until debian catches up to e17 (which should happen in the next few months). After debian sends their packaging info upstream to the e17 project, packaging for Mer should be alot easier.

If anyone else would like to work on these e17 package in Mer, then I'd be more than glad to help them out. For instance, I actually found e17 package build for the openmoko which could be converted to work in Mer pretty easily. The only problem is that I lacked the time to try it at the moment.

So far, I seen some desktop environments being mention as alternative to the Hildon default. Apart from that, what are the apps so far that currently runs on Mer?

I try to do all the apt-get installs but, at the very beginning there are some of the packages I can't find. First error; couldn't find package lbxkui-dev.

Did you try libxkbui-dev and not lbxkui-dev?

Otherwise, if you can't find it, you might try and do the install without that package. But, I installed the packages just fine. So, check for misspellings.

I know it can be hard to type all of that in with the onscreen or hardware keyboard on the device so I'd recommend using SSH if your not already. It just makes working in the terminal a lot faster on the NIT's. I think there was some decent info on ITT about using the ssh if you do a search. But, basically, you can just type $ssh ipaddress where you replace ipaddress with your tablets actual ip address on your network. So, I typically ssh onto my tablet using my desktop and copy and paste commands into the terminal so it's a lot faster and easier.