Some results finally. The stock miner from ypool didn't seem to work, even after half a day of mining. I dug down to this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=257623.msg2846079#msg2846079. Normally I'm pretty resistant to downloading binary blobs from random people on the internet and running them on my machine, but it's not running as root so what could possibly go wrong?
So on my Intel Pentium D dual-core 2.80GHz box, after running for only a few hours, I see:
SPH: 2.04 - Val/h 0.8268 - 4ch/h: 268 - 5ch/h: 24 - 6ch/h: 5.09 - 7ch/h: 1.02 - PPS: 690
Yay. Rather piddly, but I've finally gotten a result. I have a few shares in ypool and have something to show for my efforts. Yes I have to run things in wine but them's are the breaks. I still have some doubt that a GPU miner will be all it's cracked up to be, given the nature of the math involved.
Anyone know of a porting effort to native Linux?