As a newb, when I did the following:

apt-get install kernel-package libncurses5-dev fakeroot wget bzip2

neither package could be located.  After much searching, I figured out because I installed Ubuntu while offline, the Ubuntu setup commented out all the entries in source.list which meant apt-get would always fail.  If any other beginners hit this you can find source.list in /etc/apt/.   If you don't successfully complete this step, you'll no it when make menuconfig fails gloriously.

Thanks, qhawk