So how hard can this be? I said to myself. There ought to be a Debian ARMEL port for dnsutils, right? I google up "dnsutils lenny" and am rewarded with the Debian dnsutils package, which contains dig. My first reaction was holy crap, it sure looks like it has a lot of dependencies. Wonder how many of those are already installed in the scratchbox?. Nothing to do but see what apt-get has to say about it.

Got into scratchbox (I don't have a device yet, but I've installed the SDK and gone through the hello-world exercise). Boldly added the Debian lenny repository to sources.list and ran apt-get update and apt-get install dnsutils, knowing that apt-get install would ask me "y/N". To my dismay apt-get informed me that it was going to require many prerequisite packages (including a couple different versions of gcc). Moreover it wanted to replace or remove a number of packages that contained "hildon" in them.

No, not gonna do it. I may be just a city boy, but I know the difference between a real cow and a sacred cow. Messing with hildon-xxxx could only have been a bad thing. I moonwalked out of sources.list as quickly as I could and put things back the way I found them.

Moral: this porting business is not as obvious as I think it is, and I have a less than clear understanding of dpkg. More to the point, Maemo5 is not Lenny. If I'd had a real device here I might be getting familiar with the flasher at this very moment. Good times...