If anyone's interested, I managed to get xmcd working, but only from a non-debian source install. Seems that the debian source and binary xmcd packages (at least for powerpc) are broken; xmcdconfigure (sp?) doesn't work and xmcd's configuration files aren't set up correctly.
Also, the behavior of various mixer programs, at least on my Lombard, seems to be somewhat strange, at the least. Anyone have similar experiences to swap, before I bugreport? Thanks, John