Thanks to all for all the great suggestions. I think I'm going the VNC route. I set up the VNC server on my Empeg and connect to it from my desktop and also from my iPaq handheld. I cannot get the web page described in the EmpegVNC site to work, all I get is the header of the page displayed as text.

I intend to use the iPaq for the car scenario, or perhaps a Jornada Handheld (clamshell with 3/4 size keyboard) because of the boot time issue and size. I looked and was heavily temped by VIA Epia mini TX based small PC, but that was still too large to fit in my Glovebox. The other problem was the boot time, it just takes too long.

Regardless of whether I use the palm sized or handheld size WinCE device, I still need to figure out two things:

1) How to automatically start the VNC server. What is the linux equivalent of autoexec.bat, or the "startup" program group, or somehow specify that the VNC server should load as service/daemon? mtempsch mentions the pre-init system, but I could not find information related to that, nor did I find a file/directory in the Empeg with a name similar to that.

2) How to establish an ethernet connection between the empeg and the WinCE device. I have not yet tried this as I still don't have the network card on the WinCE device, but I just suspect this is not going to be as easy. Even now that the Empeg is connected to my PC via an ethernet hub (with only a laptop in addition to the Empeg and the Desktop), the comunication link between the VNC viewer and the PC seems sluggish. I takes a while to receive feedback in the VNC viewer for menu traversing actions.

If I use the handheld device, my problem is one of screen orientation. The handheld is a portrait type screen and the Empeg is very landscape. It would be nice if I could rotate the VNC display by 90 deg. It would be even nicer if only the Empeg VFD showed up without the rest of the fascia.

Thanks again for all the good info and thoughts.