I'm going to take a quick jaunt to talk of pkgcore - I feel like trying new things, and eventually this may prove much better for embedded development. Assuming I want to do Gentoo on gumstix. Don't know what pkgcore is? It's a replacement for Gentoo's portage.

I used the ferringb branches. They use bzr, one of those decentralized versioning systems.

$ bzr get http://bzr.pkgcore.org/ferringb/snakeoil-dev
$ bzr get http://bzr.pkgcore.org/ferringb/pkgcore-dev

Building/install was fine for snakeoil-dev (installed with the --prefix=/usr/local). That works well enough. But pkgcore-dev itself had trouble building because it couldn't find snakeoil includes. You would presume that snakeoil is in /usr/local/include/snakeoil, but no, it's actually in /usr/local/include/python2.4/snakeoil. This is slightly weird, so I have to add an enviroment variable for gcc to pick it up:

$ CPATH=/usr/local/include/python2.4 python ./setup.py build

Now it compiles just fine. Also (in the case of installing to /usr/local), you need to add the package location to PYTHONPATH:

$ cat /etc/env.d/99pkgcore
PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages"

Then it works fine for me without any goofy symlinks or running from the user directory like some kind of punk bitch (that's right).