While I've been on a work and university deadlines induced hiatus a lot of things have happened in the Free Software world. One of those is that the free (as in beer) BitKeeper client is now history and OpenEmbedded switched to monotone. After a bit of struggling with monotone (it's dead slow - 80mins for an initial pull on a P4 2.4GHz, much longer on older hardware) I now have a working OpenEmbedded environment again.
I've upgraded GNU Classpath, JamVM, and SableVM to current versions. Binary packages for Familiar 0.8.x are available here. The dependencies are against more recent packages than what's in Familiar 0.8.2. Try --force-depends to install them - YMMV.
For those who are wondering, I have no plans to add SableVM SDK to OpenEmbedded or ship it as a package for Familiar, since it violates a couple of common distribution rules (and the FHS?). And on embedded devices (which are low on flash space) it doesn't make sense to ship duplicate binaries anyway . Fine grained packaging and sharing binaries/libraries among applications is the rule there.
In related news, I had to remove the included external libraries from the sablevm source tree and patch out any references to them from the Makefile.am's to make autoreconf work with it (That's necessary to replace certain macros with ones that work in a cross compilation environment). I highly recommend running autoreconf to sanity check the autotools input files before releasing stuff like that.