That's the thing. I thought the debian packages had to be compiled for the target architecture from the source tarball.

Looking for the stable debian package for aspell, I found the .tar.gz, .dsc, and diff.gz.
files you mentioned here: http://packages.debian.org/source/stable/aspell .

Will running "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot" build a .deb file that will install on the N900. How do I make sure that the files get installed to /opt ?

Forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean by "patch
as appropriate"? Can you point me to some documentation that explains all the steps to build the package?

Thanks,