So it looks like there is something bad happening during a memory allocation, but only under ARMEL target (looks like a race condition)
Using a wrapper, I tracked the problem.
This is my temporary patch, it corrects the problem but will need more understanding to give a definitive patch

./configure doesn't shout anymore: the detections of capabilities (libpng, xrandr, endianness ) are properly done.
make goes (in case you have problem with arthurplugin demos, simply remove all reference to arthur in demos/Makefile and restart make)

Still under Scratchbox (I didn't have the time to test it on the device but I'm very looking forward to seeing your results), some things start (with some warnings of not found syscalls) and very few simply crash.

Still some work to be done but it's one step further.