I have the spellchecker widget on my desktop, but it doesn't spellcheck anything. I went to system settings -> locale -> spellchecker and turned on "Automatic spell checking", but it didn't help. The spellchecker in Kate doesn't seem to be working either; are the two related? I'm on a fresh install of Chakra.

Do you have the appropriate aspell dictionaries installed?

That fixed it... you're the man.