в файле debian/control

закодированная таким образом картинка :

XB-Maemo-Icon-26:
 iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABoAAAAaCAYAAACpSkzOAAAABmJLR0QA/wD/AP+g
 vaeTAAAACXBIWXMAAAsTAAALEwEAmpwYAAAAB3RJTUUH1gURDQoYya0JlwAAAU9J
 REFUSMftlL1KA0EUhb/NZl/ggnHQxsJUxt5CUucVJCCkDfgyKdIGG5/A0s5HEBtJ
 EdDAQGBgmw0YJmMzgXXYza5CtNkDW9zZw5z7c+ZCgwb/Ai3i9sVl/Bq8RIs4LRK1
 gJDsKvJyNXmJMuYTsMoY1zpgozaABdYArQNPZQ1kfyGU7SpqVwxzAMwABWhgpIwp
 4vWBB+AUWAI3ypjnfEXtPU4bLKx9vErTeCeiRSYF+fTn1j5dp2myE9EiU+DSi3wX
 ymeqRQAmZ3EcA5E/fgO6BULT8zhOcrwXoJdrXRa2Lgps2y2odAUcBUIXQdz78YyC
 SldAp8b7+bXrIv91qjZBietqCc2DjbAt4b2WxJkyZljVujlwp0U0cPxuLcAIuC+4
 dKxFlsDJarvdAGP/b6hFnDImYs+uG3hbO2AB3Jbsur63tQM+fFx3bzZocEB8AdV2
 gJBZgKTwAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC

The XB-Maemo-Icon-26 field contains the application icon file (in this case, hello_icon_26x26.png) encoded in base64. This is the icon that is shown in the Application Installer, next to the package name. To do this encoding in Linux, you can use either uuencode or openssl (there can be more suitable applications). Maemos's Scratchbox rootstrap is delivered with uuencode. Do not forget to put a white space at the beginning of each line containing the icon-encoded text. The white space serves as indentation. The same rule stands for the long package description ( A very simple application[...]).

отсюда : http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/documen … tml#link26   

uuencode под etch не нашёл пока / с опциями openssl base64 как то тоже не получилось ясности....

вопрос собственно : кто как кодирует в base64 ?

так же встретил вариант :

base64 icon.png | gawk '{print " "$$0;}' > icon.txt

http://madabar.com/techblog/2007/07/15/manually-creating-a-deb-package-for-maemo/

нашёл : пакет sharutils
http://packages.debian.org/etch/sharutils   
shar, unshar, uuencode, uudecode

uuencode --base64