Just posting this to help anyone else out who has run into this problem. I ran into it with the avrdude package provided for Debian 5.0.6 which was avrdude 5.5 as it does not include the programmer definitions for arduino which avrdude 5.10 has.

This should be resolved by using the latest version of avrdude 5.10 which can be downloaded from Index of /releases/avrdude/

One other thing to do if using the Debian 5.0.6 arduino package is to change the symbolic links in /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools (as root) to point to avrdude 5.10, e.g.:

cd /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools

ls -la

total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-05-01 00:53 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2011-05-01 00:53 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 2011-05-01 00:53 avrdude -> ../../../../bin/avrdude
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2011-05-01 00:53 avrdude.conf -> /etc/avrdude.conf

mv avrdude avrdude-5.5

mv avrdude.conf avrdude-5.5.conf

ln -s -T /avrdude-5.10/bin/avrdude avrdude

ln -s -T /avrdude-5.10/etc/avrdude.conf avrdude.conf

ls -la

total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-05-15 01:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2011-05-01 00:53 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 2011-05-15 01:42 avrdude -> /avrdude-5.10/bin/avrdude
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 2011-05-01 00:53 avrdude-5.5 -> ../../../../bin/avrdude
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2011-05-01 00:53 avrdude-5.5.conf -> /etc/avrdude.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 44 2011-05-15 01:43 avrdude.conf -> /avrdude-5.10/etc/avrdude.conf