Hey, it's all relative. Believe me, there is a difference between something easy to compile and hard to compile. Especially when we're talking about the IT, where you have a gcc toolchain that is much older than the one in current (read: debian and ubuntu) distros, and you're sometimes porting from i386 to armel... compared to some things I've had to do for the IT, abiword compiling is painless.

Seriously, you have a great guide there -- I might try to use it to set up boot-debian and also chrooting into it from the IT later.