When you read... do you think?
I have my hdd mounted on /mnt (because it's shorter, duh!)
maybe you have it mounted on /tmp/harddisk
I dunno, just place it somewhere you can access it!
and yes, I had several properly compiled packages under oleg:
libupnp, wol, Ocaml, openssh, openvpn, ncurses and some others.
some other guys reading my how-to managed to compile things like extra PHP includes.
+ just start off with something easy and small to compile, so you can get the grip on it and feel the way compiling happens.