jamie and i just sorted out how to get notifications working on this noesis installation. The problem appears to be that the cronjob wasn't running properly, mainly because it was being kicked off by php4-cli, and php4-cli's configuration (/etc/php4/cli/php.ini in a sarge system) didn't have the mysql.so extension loaded.

Since the notifications are normally kicked off by drupal's cronjob, and the cronjob couldn't access the database, nothing was happening. frankly, i think this should have generated an error condition that alerted the sysadmin that the cronjob was not being run somehow. perhaps that's a bug in the debian packaging of the cronjob?

anyway, if you have an account on noesis, you can configure your notification preferences after you log in by clicking on "my account", then choosing the "my notify settings" tab.

Thanks to jamie for finally getting this ironed out!