I'm new to these forums - I joined because I'm considering buying a N800 or N810. I'm interested in using the following applications, all of which have at least been mentioned on this site:

Pine/Alpine
Latex
Truecrypt
Remind
Emacs

I'm curious: have you used any of these applications? How tricky was the installation? How is the experience using the programs? Do you think it was worth it?

Last question: has anyone used/attempted to use Xemacs on an N800/810? Do you think it is possible?

I don't have a lot of experience with linux or software building, so understanding the technical discussions about wrangling different applications to work on the N800/810 is hard for me. Any help you can offer - especially if it uses nice small words that I can understand - is greatly appreciated.

All of the programs listed above are hard to use on the N800 due to the lack of a keyboard (don't know about truecrypt). Provided a .install or .deb package, it should be easy to install. Otherwise, you'll have to go through the hassle of cross-compiling (or someone else) if you want a certain package.

N810 keyboard is very nice though. I'm new to the software area but my N810 does wonders so far with what i've ran on it. Like Navi said, if you can get it in a package, it's a breeze to install software.

I have a bluetooth keyboard for my N800 and have been very successful using maemotex (the maemo packaging of pdflatex) to write documents on it. I don't have a laptop and the combination of the N800 with the keyboard has been an acceptable replacement for me.
I have not seen Emacs, but Vim works quite well as a text editor, as does maemopad. Can't help you with the other apps.

Thanks for the comments. My understanding is that a .install or .deb file for a specific application means I'm good to go - that's very helpful. I've seen other places in the forums where someone posts that they've "made a .deb" and now I know what that means!