What nifties do you have on your Empeg?

I have many of the above and more, yet it all takes 200 bytes of storage on my empeg (OK, that's probably one 4K block). Let me explain.

I have a complete Linux distribution in a directory on a NFS server. The only thing necessary on the empeg is a short shell script which mounts the NFS-exported directory and then runs a modified init script within there. That in turn runs whichever parts of the standard Linux boot process make sense on the empeg - setting the clock, enabling interfaces, running a few daemons, etc. When I type exit it shuts everything down and brings me back to the normal empeg shell. Another exit restarts the player.

Advantages of putting your complete distribution on a NFS server: 1. you can use all your diskspace for music; 2. restoring your complete environment after an upgrade takes 10 seconds (to cut and paste a short shell script). Disadvantages: using the environment might be somewhat slower since everything is transfered over 10mbps Ethernet rather than from a local hard disk.

One of these days I'll get around to documenting the process to get this running but it hasn't happened yet... Doing it the first time was quite painful since I needed to cross-compile a bunch of things which didn't want to cooperate, but duplicating it now shouldn't be too bad. The main prerequisite is that you need root access on a NFS server with enough space for a Linux distribution.

Borislav