Once you have added a lot of textures, pack them into the blend file(before saving) then when you unpack again for next session everything is there in a folder, WARNING it does make the blends a lot bigger but you'll not lose the textures even if you move it to another machine.

As for building blender I have to learn Linux first lol, maybe the day is coming ;-) once I get to half a million polys my comp runs like a 3 legged dog in treacle :-(