unfortunately I rebooted between when I got the errors, and when I
posted. It seems that I managed to
install whatever it needed in the meantime
because my last attempt worked though it
got a kernel panic when I tried to boot to it. I
really don't know what it was looking for, and I don't know why
auto-apt didn't notice it looking for anything. Maybe because the
linux source doesn't use configure scripts. Maybe a virtual
package with everything you need to compile vanilla kernels is
possible. I think I just needed some random thing. I think
perhaps what I did was run apt-get install build-dep
kernel-image-2.6.8-1, and that brought in whatever I needed. I'm
not sure.
If you use udev then you'll have to update that to 058+, see
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/20/180 for more info