Just letting you guys know that I haven't forgotten about ya! I've been studying the nuances of Scratchbox and Debian packaging. I have two things to say:
1. Debain packages are a God-send for end-users and will help get Linux into the "Average Joe's" home computer.
2. The act of creating Debian packages is slow, convoluted, picky, and it gets worse when you add in all the nuances and complexity of a cross-compiler and emulated environment!

Anyhow, I've managed to get Octave into a package using the existing Maemo/extras libraries. However, it seems the version number is getting messed up. I have homework to deal with, so I'll have to get back to this in two days before I post this. I shudder at what it's going to take to push this into Maemo extras, since we first have to compile a working copy of f2c before you can compile octave.

I found out two things with the failed document building:
1: You must have the texinfo package installed (apt-get install texinfo).
2: The munge-texi program that is created during building will NOT work in the Armel environment. It keeps tossing out null pointers and crashing the build. It's used to convert/combine the *.txi files into *.texi files. However, the *.texi files already exist, so it's just a matter of "touching" those files so that the Makefile considers them up-to-date and never runs munge-texi. I'll see if I can add such a command to the build statement in the debian rules file.

It's been a heck of a learning experience this week. Once I get my head wrapped around this, I hope to next tackle the Ted RTF text editor!

- Jim