Okay, let's imagine for a second the following scenario: A man is in a remote mountain cabin with his empeg, a computer, and internet access. However, a pack of weasels break into the cabin, break the man's arms and legs, rip his flesh, and worst of all, steal the serial cable for his empeg. The man now has no way to leave the cabin to get another serial cable, and since it's so remote, no one can come to deliver him another one.

In that scenario, if the man wants to upgrade to 2.0 is he completely out of luck? Or, can he hack through it somehow?

Hypothetical man has hijack installed. So isn't there some way that the upgrade file could be dissected so that the kernel is discarded and the binaries get installed to the root of the drive using good old linux? If I remember correctly, the upgrade file completely wipes out the root partition and replaces it with a new one. If that can't be done, then I suppose at least the relevant binaries can be copied over (assuming they can get extracted out of the upgrade file).

(The actual situation is that I'm out of town for several days, and would like to at least sample the goodness of 2.0. However, my serial cable is at home, and I don't feel like buying another one when I have a perfectly good one at home. I do dislike weasels, though.)