OK, I didn't mean to make more work for you - just a suggestion! I guess I was thinking of those days of parallelKnoppix where I thought you were looking for new packages.
BTW, I think I used the binary once and a deb another time to install Sage. I think I found a debian package under
http://packages.debian.org but kpackage installs it somewhere weird.... The only reason I mention Sage is because you may find the distributed version, dSage, interesting although there's not much documentation for it.
TIA,
AJG