This section details my *limited* experience trying to setup my crossdev tools on Ubuntu. Ubuntu by default doesn't ship with all the essential build tools, ships with Vi rather than Vim, and dash as the symlink for sh instead of bash. Some of the crossdev tools expect the symlink /bin/sh to point to /bin/bash. One could change all the references to #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash, but it's simpler to change the symlink.
So let's just get those details out of the way. To install Vim and the essential build tools, from a command line enter: "sudo apt-get install vim build-essential".
Dash may be a fast and fine shell, but if several of the scripts one relies on expect sh to point to bash, things can get ugly. To change /bin/sh to /bin/bash enter the following from the command line:
sudo rm -f /bin/sh
sudo ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh
If one wishes to know more about why Ubuntu made this change, see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh