A special thanks to Aditya from Institute Teknologi Bandung for his patience.  Without his correspondence, I probably couldn't have created such a comprehensive how to for installing Washtub.  With Aditya being in Indonesia and me being in the US, it sometimes took 12 hours for us to read each other's responses.  What follows here is the meat from our conversation and the main process for getting Washtub installed on Ubuntu. This is also published in the washtub svn repo at:

Much respect to the Ubuntu folks for their fine distribution. With too much delay, I have installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy something or other) and I am so pleasantly surprised. I have been such a strong follower of the Red Hat & Fedora initiatives that I never stopped to check out Ubuntu.