Bitbake 1.4.0 is recommended by OpenEmbedded (what else uses bitbake, anyway?) and is far faster (really, it takes less than a second where it would previously take a minute) at loading when the tree is unchanged. The current ebuild works when the SRC_URI is changed to: SRC_URI="http://download.berlios.de/${PN}/${P}.tar.gz"
in portage, thanks