We have released debian packages for the kinect stack on C Turtle and have also added Ubuntu Maverick compatibility. We hope that this will make it easier to play with ROS and the Kinect over your Thanksgiving holidays ;).
We made a major breakthrough with the kinect driver -- we have figured out how to get the IR image. You can see an example here:
We've already used the IR image to do monocular and stereo calibration using the ROS calibration tools, and will soon have RGB/depth calibration for you to play with as well.
Happy Thanksgiving!