Thanks to everyone who worked on this. I just installed emacs_22.1-1_armel.deb on my N800 and it needed very little to get it working.

For the record, I needed to install it on an SD card: it simply isn't possible to fit it into the internal memory AFAIK.

# mkdir /media/mmc1/emacs
# apt-get install ncurses-base
# dpkg -v --instdir=/media/mmc1/emacs emacs_22.1-1_armel.deb
# chown -r user /media/mmc1/emacs
# chgrp -r users /media/mmc1/emacs

Run with /media/mmc1/emacs/usr/bin/emacs

Mods needed (the absence of the first directory mentioned, arm-linux-gnueabi, is puzzling: without it you get an immediate error message from Emacs)

# mkdir -p /media/mmc1/emacs/usr/libexec/emacs/22.1/arm-linux-gnueabi
# mkdir -p /usr/libexec/emacs/
# ln -s /media/mmc1/emacs/usr/libexec/emacs/22.1/ /usr/libexec/emacs/
# ln -s /media/mmc1/emacs/usr/share/emacs/ /usr/share/

plus adding (setq dired-use-ls-dired nil) to your .emacs as recommended in this forum.

I still need to try and install the X version when I have time.

I'm now editing LaTeX and XML documents with psgml-mode with full Unicode support, writing my XSLT files with xsltide-mode, and executing the processes with Saxon. I've had a few gasps from colleagues too :-)

Laptop? We don' need no steeking laptop...

///Peter