hacking Sugar - building sugar on Ubuntu 7.10

So I find myself trying to build Sugar, the OLPC user interface for children. As always I don't really have any computers to dedicate to development for Sugar, but Sugar only supports being built on a handful of Linux distributions and versions. So I decided to hack a little and try to build it on my server, marmot.dudeabides.net. marmot runs Ubuntu 7.10. I found that if I pulled down the newest git source of Sugar, there is an area in config/sysdeps where there are files representing Linux distributions and versions. So I did this:
cp config/sysdeps/50ubuntu-allversions.xml config/sysdeps/50ubuntu-7.10.xml
That at least allowed me to run ./sugar-jhbuild depscheck :)
./sugar-jhbuild build is running now. This is quite complicated. Makes me start to wonder about the wisdom of code reuse. I guess it just moves the problems up the stack to a higher level. Instead of trying to make a device driver work, I'm trying to trick some code into compiling itself in an environment that it doesn't already understand.