Mepis on pendrive: some improvement, some dead-ends

Once again I spent the day using Mepis 8 on the 4GB pendrive on my EeePC 901. Quite honestly, it lacks very little for normal day-2-day use although it might just be very marginally slower. Additionally, it seems, for reasons I haven't investigated, to run into high CPU problems with windows graying out momentarily and the whole screen freezing.
I managed to get Yakuake working fine today simply by changing the action key from F12 to F10. Why F12 refused to work is still not clear to me as it doesn't seem to do anything when hit without Yakuake running.
I had first tried to open the drop-down window using this command

qdbus org.kde.yakuake /yakuake/window toggleWindowState

however this gave an error stating that the service "org.kde.yakuake" wasn't available.
Indeed, running "qdbus" on its own, doesn't show "org.kde.yakuake" as one of the available services. I don't know enough about dbus/qdbus to understand this even after reading through this and this tutorials.
Nevertheless, by editing the ~/.kde/share/config/yakuakerc file so that "first run" was set to "true" rather than "false", I again got the opportunity to select the action button which I changed to F10. Now everything works fine.
I had less luck (well, actually none) getting Emerald installed as window decorator. Although I located an Emerald deb it wouldn't install because no libemeraldengine0 was available and I wasn't able to find a deb (or anything else) of this. I also found some Debian forum threads discussing the same sunbect and confirming that since the demise of Shame's repo, Emerald is no longer available. Question is though, how come it's still available in Ubuntu. Also, how about compiling from source. Need a little more investigation here.
Today also I took out Kcheckgmail and installed Checkgmail in it's place. The reason for the change was that when i clicked on the Kcheckgmail icon no notification opened telling me what unread mails were available and some detail about them.
Ironically, after changing to Checkgmail these notifications were also not available (although I do have them in some other distros where I run Checkgmail. So looks like somethings missing which I'll have to investigate.
Didn't yet figure out how to toggle between English and Portuguese keyboard layouts.