First problem I encountered was the pager was set to /usr/bin/pager so that help() did not work: /etc/R/Renvironment needs more felicitous choices ('more' works OK for me). The graphics demo worked beautifully, as do a random set of example()'s I ran.
Installing R packages from source is a challenge on many platforms, because of the toolchain required. It seems difficult to get a maemo Fortran -- the octave port used f2c AIUI. My usual g95 does not extend to arm, let alone armel, and I am not looking forward to making a gfortran cross-compiler from source for my own uses. Nevertheless, at least the recommended packages should be available as binary packages. just 2c, David Duffy.