After almost 10 months of not looking at the Navit for N800 code, here I am again. Of course a few things have changed in the mean time.
1. Naivt has undergone a lot of improvements
2. Scratchbox is up one version
3. Maemo Diablo is up one version
4. I forgot what I had changed 
After upgrading scratchbox and the Maemo toolkits, as wellas Navit’s source code, I could no longer compile. Specifically Autogen was failing.
The solution, add the patches from this bug to /scratchbox/tools/autotools/automake-1.9/share/aclocal-1.9/init.m4 and to /scratchbox/tools/autotools/automake-1.9/share/automake-1.9/Automake/Variable.pm. Most of the stuff in the bug link is documentation or test code related. This fixes the errors you get due to the addition of Objective C code somewhere in the project. Alternatively the errant portion in the ‘configure.in’ file could be ifdef’d since this is not used on the N8×0 series.
This leaves issues with maptool (cores under Qemu) while building the osm map. But adding -disable-samplemap to the configure script bypasses that action so we can move on.