Build a Vanilla Kernel

Hi All,
I recently installed debian on my dockstar from the how to guide here. I thought it would be good to get the latest kernel, and would be an interesting project to build it myself. After downloading the latest stable vanilla kernel to my Ubuntu build box from kernel.org (I always use this mirror: http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/) I set up the cross compile environment as linked to here, and followed loosely the instructions on that page (without the parts about installing the kernel-src from a repo, and patching it with the dockstar patch). When I got to the last make-kpkg command, from within the cross compile environment, it begins to compile, but ends up terminating with this error:
Failed to create a ./debian directory: Bad file descriptor at /usr/bin/make-kpkg line 984.
Also, I went back through the whole output and found the following concerning messages:
dpkg-architecture: warning: Specified GNU system type arm-linux-gnueabi does not match gcc system type i686-linux-gnu.
make[2]: arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc: Command not found
BTW, I have the latest version of kernel-package.
Any ideas?
Thanks!

Permission/space problems? Are you running as root? Does the user have rights to create the debian directory?

No, all of that checks out...
I fixed a few parameters and now I can get the command not found error to go away, but I still get all of the warnings, and it still terminates with the same error.
Thanks!

Oh wait...I rebuilt in the home directory instead of /usr/src, and now it works!
Thanks a lot anon!