...but I have no experience in this, much less any in Debian/Linux. Although having used the terminal on OS 2008 I'm getting around a bit.

So, from what I gathered in some posts do I need "Scratchbox", or the SDK? I'm on XP Home SP3. I'm assuming this is as simple as a few commands, waiting a bit, toss it on the N800 and hopefully it runs.

Basically, I wanna spend a few hours today looking for apps outside of Maemo.org - the only one I can think of off hand would be some kind of virtual guitar you could pick or strum, or a better piano than PyAno, or a drum machine. Anything beyond that... I dunno.

Then I guess I'll have to keep in mind any libraries that are required (which brings to mind, once I tried apt-get install nameoflib [can't remember the name] and it was not found -- are there cases where you have to specify a specific repository? Where does apt-get install pull from on OS 2008 anyway?)

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you may be overreaching by starting on the tablet without any Linux desktop experience in programming or package management. You might want to start there first and then work yourself into something higher-level on the tablet like Python instead of a compiled language (I assume you mean C or C++).

scratchbox is the environment for developing, but it runs on a GNU/linux desktop, not on windows or the tablet.

so in addition to learning about developing and packaging etc, you'll need to have a working installation of .... ubuntu, debian, gentoo, whatever...

Well, I mean.. the exception to that is that you CAN use Python or the bash shell to write programs directly on the tablet.. but I'm not sure I'd call that a proper 'development environment', which is what I think you were aiming for.

I seem to recall that Benny's right--scratchbox is the proper dev environment and that doesn't run in Windows. Thankfully, it runs in Linux and you have many competing high quality competitors to choose from... cost is generally: FREE