Not sure about your error.. but you can clean that up a little and rm -f *.ex *.EX in that debian folder. Those are example files made by the helper package in case you wanted to include something similar.. but are not required and are just bloat. Have you tried just running: from the directory above your quickclick directory? (and make the debian directory DEBIAN). Just a thought, from here. ETA: I think part of the problem here is you are trying to follow the steps to building a debian package, from a source based package. Those steps automagically build the directory structure and everything for you, then compiled the binaries, then build the package, then lintian it. You have done half of that yourself.. so you're starting from the middle but running the commands meant for the beginning. All you have to do is package the directory and control files you already made (with the command above, or using "fakeroot dpkg-deb --build ...") and then running lintian against it manually will tell you if anything is missing or broken. I'm no expert at packaging.. this is all what I learned when I was messing with my own repo for Deblet.