Unfortunately it doesn't work at all on my Debian. I'm not sure what's wrong or if I made a mistake somewhere, but here is what I did:
1) I've installed a fresh Debian wheezy and installed all these debs (apart from bitcoin-qt as I need no GUI).
2) I've copied over whole blockchain from a windows machine with updtodate BitcoinQt 0.8.5
3) I started bitcoind with my custom config:
paytxfee=0.0001
rpcuser=root
rpcpassword=password
rpcallowip=192.168.1.73
daemon=1
debug=1
checkblocks=20
checklevel=0
Bitcoind starts, but it:
a) always asking for database reindex and doesn't pick the index I've copied;
b) if I start it with -reindex flag - it hangs in processes with max CPU, but it doesn't respond over JSON-RPC, and even after a long time waiting shows no signs of life, so I have to just kill it.
However, I found something interesting elsewhere. Debian Unstable repo has
bitcoind package available for armhf/armel architectures, and it's last 0.8.5 version. So I installed it and it works nearly fine. Unfortunately it still doesn't like my index copy, but when I run it with -reindex - it start fine, responds over JSON-RPC and indexing goes on, I see it by the quickly increasing blocks count. Full reindex will take I think 24-48h, but I hope it will work fine afterwards.