RESOLVED. Sorry, I was looking for a solution and I, finally, found on http://home.mminternet.com/~delaroca/ that I had to install ncurses-base to have termcap entries.
Now alpine works perfectly.
So I can confirm alpine 1.0 runs on OS2008 on an N810 (just in case this is useful).
Many, many tx to the people that compiled the beast (and to the people doing it). :-)