I used to have the entire maemo sandbox on my NIT and chroot into it. If that is too much you might try building under the debian chroot. Lastly, you can probably extract the files from the debianutils using dpkg -x and then copy them into place manually. I've done that with a number of things.

Another problem is that for large builds your /tmp directory will run out of space. I have a script that fixes this.

For software you write yourself, however, all you need is the compiler(s) and make.