What do you do to get it to work? I get:
and then the mixer comes up blank. Choosing "Edit -> Sound Card Properties" crashes the program.

I suspect my ALSA config files aren't set up right. I have copied /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf from my maemo dir to my Debian dir...

Umm... don't remember. Soon as I get Debian back on, I'll let you know. Don't think it was anything tricky.

You try with -c $WHATEVER yet? There are 2 alsa interfaces, IIRC. One is boring. The other is interesting, and lets you play out the speakers, headphone jack, and BT (HSP) all at once. The sync between HSP and speakers/phones is a little annoying, but it's kinda cool. Especially if you have the car stereo drowning out the headset (when you're in the car), but when you leave the car, you still hear it with the headset. (Obviously, the correct way to accomplish this balance is to turn the headset down, not the stereo up; hearing loss isn't fun and all that.)

Um, can you be more specific? Call me an idiot (It's OK, many do) but I don't understand "-c $WHATEVER".

Is there a way to tell the mixer to use a different interface? Is that what -c does? Can I get a list of those somehow? And shouldn't the alsamixer be able to locate all of the interfaces and let you choose, rather than producing a cryptic error and crashing when you try to set up the sound card?

EDIT: Aha! alsa-base and alsa-utils not installed... seeing if that fixes things... (why doesn't the mixer depend on them?! )

EDIT2: Nope... still futzing...

EDIT3: Ok, this is bigger than alsamixer. I used to be able to get stuff to play with "aplay test.wav" and now even that gives an error. So alsa is borked in my "easy chroot" setup; better get this figured out!

EDIT4: needed to also "apt-get install libasound2-plugins" to get alsamixer working. I can also make "aplay" work now.

The gnome one however still gives the same error... "Sound card properties" causes a segfault...

Umm... that actually wouldn't apply to gnome-alsamixer; that would be alsamixer itself. Man page here; -c indeed tells it which card to use, but that's handled some other way in gnome-alsamixer.

(Indeed, it should find a usable one, but thought it might be worth trying, in case the problem was specific to that one...)

Also, there are devices and cards; not sure which one it was... I'll try again when I get that back on.

I should go through the forums and compile a list of messages from you where you say some variant of, "I've completely borked something important on my tablet, so I can't test that right now..." I think it would number in the dozens...

Benson, why does your tablet never seem to be working? What do you DO to that poor girl?

Really, it's mostly attributable to a flaky (and now retired) SD card; I'd guess only about 40% have been due to direct stupid or risky actions on my part.

But, really, some of the stuff I do is asking to have trouble; I should get more devices if I'm going to do that, but I'm too cheap. Just bought my third N800, but both #2 and #3 are gifts to siblings. (Sister, who's reasonably competent with, but not very interested in, computer stuff; it'll live a long and peaceful life. Kid brother, who's just as overambitious as me. With any luck, though, we won't be down at the same time...)

And being too busy to fix the thing for the better part of a month is a major problem as well. And the worst part of it is, when I'm reinstalling, I'm not hacking.

Current fixing is in progress, though (Already got Chinook and Diablo (final) on...), and I hope my more rigorous backup scheme and maybe an extra SD will make things go smoother in the future.

I would love to know some Java applets that people really wish they could run on the tablets, I'd like to see how they run in Kazehakase.

EDIT: Here's a stock news ticker, it scrolls fine, the only problem is that the whole system gets a bit sluggish when this is running...

Windowmaker runs really well and looks great.

jpilot seems to work, though I haven't loaded it with data yet...

I got gedit installed, it's a little bit slow to launch, but once it's there, it's working quite well. And with a few tweaks, it can become the best development tool on the IT! Fullscreen plugin available here.

I use gedit too, I love the syntax highlighting...

I'm quite frustrated about one thing; I'm sure there's a full regexp search-and-replace available for gedit, but I can't find it anywhere...

EDIT: Perhaps this?

EDIT2: yes, untar (tar xzvf gedit2_regex_replace_plugin.tar.gz) into /usr/lib/gedit-2/plugins/