Well... A way way back I installed a whole slew of standard UNIX utils from a debian tarball that had been posted on this BBS... I think those basics (things like tee, join, cut, gawk, etc) should be there in addition to what you've mentioned. Basically all the important UNIX stuff that the standard developer image leaves out.

I agree, everything else should be set up as an add-on package. Your strategy sounds good.

Here's my concern though... Your strategy seems to be to use an alternate root partition on /dev/hda2 and chrooting to it. If this is done, the standard root partition (/dev/hda5) is wasted, right?

I always thought the best solution would be to install a standard linux setup on the regular root partition and use /dev/hda2 for the user apps (packages) that people want to install. This would keep the apps OFF the music partition, where they tend to cause problems with synchronization. I don't think there's more than 16mb of things we really need on the root partition, is there? Everything else would seem to be package-able, and reside on /dev/hda2. At least in my mind..

The way I would imagine it working, when I go to upgrade, I would take the empeg-supplied .upgrade file, along with a 3rd-party upgrade file with the user stuff, and feed them into some kind program which combines them and sends them over to the Empeg. The root partition from the empeg-supplied upgrade file would be ignored, and instead we'd use the stuff that's in the 3rd-party upgrade file. We'd just use the stuff under the /empeg directory from the official upgrade file. User packages (which could be selected during this mythical upgrade-building process) would all go to /dev/hda2.

This would make sure we're not wasting /dev/hda5, and as I said, avoid problems with apps running on the music drive and causing fsck's and syncs to fail.

Would this work?