Still no dice (even with Red Pill). Having a hard time finding advice on this for the OS 2006 on the 770 (though it sounds like some folks are having similar issues with OS 2007 on the n800).
in debian, apt-get source libgdbm3,
in scratchbox-armel, cd into the directory and
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
then cd .. and dpkg -i libgdbm3*.deb