Ubuntu 11.10 
Courtesy of Dave Tomkins.
Slighty modifications by Tim Brecht to try to clarify.

For those of you who are interested...

these are the 2 changes I had to make to get os161 working on a virgin
ubuntu 11.10 installation (within a virtualbox)

Using this website as the starting
point:http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs350/common/Install161NonCS.html

(aside -- packages I had to install)
sudo apt-get install gettext
sudo apt-get install texinfo
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

the whole creation of configure files in these types of distributions is
a 'black box' to me, (un?)fortunately I've never had to go through and
create them myself... so hopefully if they are re-created, then these
two issues could be fixed automatically

1) #the configure (and configure.in) files in [os161-binutils] and
   [os161-gdb] break because of the check for makeinfo version > 4.4 fails
    -- the makeinfo version I obtained was 4.11 and there's a goofy fail
    because it thinks 4.11 is older than 4.4
    [took a while to pinpoint, but based on my googling -- this is a common
    error]
    I hacked it by changing the regex in a few configure files

In binutils-2.17+os161-2.0.1/configure
Change
       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*([1-3][0-9]|4\.[4-9]|[5-9])' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
to
       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*([1-3][0-9]|4\.([4-9]|[1-9][0-9])|[5-9])'       


In gdb-6.6+os161-2.0/configure
Change
       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*([1-3][0-9]|4\.[4-9]|[5-9])' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
to
       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*([1-3][0-9]|4\.([4-9]|[1-9][0-9])|[5-9])'       

In gcc-4.1.2+os161-2.0/configure
Change
       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*([1-3][0-9]|4\.[2-9]|[5-9])' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
to
       | egrep 'texinfo[^0-9]*([1-3][0-9]|4\.([2-9]|[1-9][0-9])|[5-9])'       


so it would require a patch to those configure files (or re-create them)

2) I was getting compilation errors in GDB -- I'm guessing that some
default warning / error flag changed ?!?
and so when running configure I had to add#--disable-werror,#changing
the line:
./configure --target=mips-harvard-os161 --prefix=$HOME/sys161/tools#
==>
./configure --target=mips-harvard-os161 --prefix=$HOME/sys161/tools
--disable-werror