equivs-control is a bash script that just copies a file. Only need to replace #!/bin/bash with #!/bin/sh and it will work. equivs-build is a perl script. You need perl, perl-modules (comes with perl) and fakeroot (SDK repository). I'm not sure it works out of the box on Maemo, but nothing prevents you from using equivs on another box to create packages for Maemo. I'll see if I can post an example, but it may have to wait two weeks (going on holiday).