The daemon that lets you connect your ebookwise through usb to is eb1150. It is written in c++ by Mitch Reierson. If you know how to create packages for whatever distro you are using I don't see any reason why it couldn't be packaged. The version available here from the mobile read forums has been patched so that it would compile on ubuntu 8.04. If I remember right there was an issue with compiling for the newest version of ubuntu. The original
Source Forge link is here. I tried to contact the original author to submit the patch but never got any kind of reply.
As far as linreb goes I don't think anyone uses that much anymore. The
impserve program included in
ebookutils from ashkulz is what I currently use as well as many others with both linux and windows computers. The wiki page has information about setting that up as well.
There is a meta package, build-essentials in ubuntu that should cover what is needed to build eb1150, at least I think that is what the name is. As for impserve its a python script and pretty much every linux install has python.