Before beginning development, you should have a workstation (or VM) with Debathena installed. Unless you have a strong preference, we recommend starting with the highest version of Ubuntu supported by Debathena. As of January 2011, this is Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). I You should install at least the debathena-standard metapackage. You should also install the debathena-debian-dev package, which installs a number of packages required for building Debian packages. You should also create the file ~/.devscripts with the following contents: {{{ DEBUILD_DPKG_BUILDPACKAGE_OPS="-us -uc -sa -i -I.svn" DEBEMAIL="yourusername@mit.edu" DEBFULLNAME="Your Full Name" }}}