For what it's worth, I extracted Jim Pick's debian tarball to a directory on one of music partitions, chrooted to the new environment, and installed a few more packages that I needed. After booting the player, all I need to do is turn on the swap partition and chroot into the other environment, and I'm all set. No mucking up the root partition, and upgrades don't affect it.

...and there's something deeply satisfying in typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' on a digital music player (especially one with an NFS mounted root filesystem)... :-)

--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)