Thank you James for your explanation, I'm sorry that most of it goes over my head Though if I've understood anything then it sounds like a tare button would be a useful addition to Carman which assume you'd have to with the engine off (and again, what's with the numbers 1.013... (no need to answer btw)

Actually making changes to Carman is a little slower. I know the answer to questions such as 'how do such and such' is more often that not along the lines of you have to read the manual etc, - the problem is sometimes knowing where to find the manual. Anyway I've made some progress (even though it feels like 1 step forward 2 back but...) :
I have Kubuntu (I think I should have downloaded Ubuntu but I found Kubuntu first but it seems to be working OK and since it took the best part of a day to download the CD I'm going to stick with it)
Then I installed Kubuntu - it wanted to fetch hundreds of files that weren't on the CD - another day (lucky me, I live in a broadband blackspot )
BTW, it's quite cool that Kubuntu starts up with all your programs just as they were from the last shutdown
And next the Maemo 5 SDK - just a small program to download and then run in a kind of CMD window which started a windows installer program which proudly announced it would take around 20 minutes - depending on broadband speed. Needless to say I went to bed before it had finished.
Today I tried to get to grips with the maemo 5 SDK which to say the least is a somewhat confusing mixture of windows programs and CMD prompts. I managed to follow the the simple hello world examples and then something a little more complex; making an installable package for MaemoPad
Great I thought, somewhat prematurely. Surely it's just a matter of using the 'dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot' for all of the Carman source code packages. Whilst this worked for some of them others didn't work out as well. I think the problem is that I don't have some libraries or something like that:
or
Can anyone steer me in the right direction to find the libraries I need in order to sort out this dependency issue?

Thinking ahead a little I realise I'll end up with 6 of these 'deb' packages, but presumably these are ultimately combined to make just 1 Carman.deb package - what do I do to make that happen?

Thanks in advance,
Sophie x