Well Today I finally got nautilus compiled on my home debian machine. Yay!!! It turns out that if you use and old version of libpng such as 0.96, everything (imlib, gnome-libs, nautilus) will compile fine, but as soon as you run it you will get SIGSEV in __morecore in libc.so.6. It will drive you batty and won't be able to run nautilus. I am not sure where the correct place to check for the version of libpng is. libpng 1.0.3 and higher work fine. (debian package libpng2 and libpng2-dev ) will give you what you need. So I now have a full configuration for what you need to build gnome and nautilus on Debian. Perhaps I will post the needed packages a little later.
I am still working on my portable development tools. Currently I am focusing on things that work for both a bourne derived shell and perl. I am doing most things in perl, but it makes sense to have hooks so korn, bourne, bash, and zsh users can have their environment setup the same way the build is.
I have some working prototypes, all ready packaged up to be used as perl libraries that I use to do gnome builds. I will add some more functionality soon.
I also wrote a static route startup script using a config file. It is designed for Debian, since they seem to still be lacking this, at least with potato Debian has a sensible networking script. If you need static routes for your machine you can grab my stuff here. It just uses a very basic config file and will add and remove the routes with a stop and start.