Error on new installation

I have been a long time user of git for little home jobs.  My version of 
git (except in the very early days) been obtained as a standard debian 
binary package.

I have been developing some software on my home machine for a web site I 
run at a hosting company.  I have a "site" branch for the version that 
is configured for running at the site, but up until now I have been 
manually transfering the files to the site I thought I had updated in 
the last commit.

I have now realised that if I stick a git repository on this hosting 
computer where my web site application has to be, I could git push my 
site branch to it on update and then use a post receive hook there to 
checkout the newly received version - thus automatically keeping the 
right files in sync.

Unfortunately this hosting company does not have git installed, so I 
downloaded the tar.gz version of 1.6.0, unpacked it and from inside the 
new directory did a make install.  

This appears to have put key programs in ~/bin and the remainer in 
~/libexec/git-core

As a first test, I went into the directory where one of my applications 
resides and did

git init
git add .
git commit

I then tried to clone back this repository with the following results

(NOTE mb is stanza in my ~/.ssh/config file which fully defines 
host/username/identity etc for my server at the hosting company)

alan@kanger:~/dev$ git 
clone --upload-pack=/home/melindas/bin/git-upload-pack 
ssh://mb/home/melindas/public_html/football/
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/alan/dev/football/.git/
error: git-upload-pack: git-pack-objects died with error.
fatal: git-upload-pack: aborting due to possible repository corruption 
on the remote side.
remote: fatal: exec pack-objects failed.
remote: aborting due to possible repository corruption on the remote 
side.
fatal: early EOF
fatal: index-pack failed
alan@kanger:~/dev$


the question is - why does git-pack-objects die.  I presume the 
repository is not corrupt, it has been newly created.  Does it rely on 
some other programs on the host that might not be there?


-- 
Alan Chandler
http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk