I just started as well and followed the disucssion until here... I guess I'm now at the same level as noobmonkey:

Set up my laptop with ubuntu, installed maemo sdk, installed esbox and started with the helloworld example...

But... that's where I'm stuck now: Somehow when I try to build the application, there keep errors showing up, saying that hildonmm.h and libosso.h couldn't be found (and some others). Where can I find these? Do I need to be online for building the application? Are they somewhere local on my disk?