Can't comment on the first two, but emptriv is a little buggy in that it doesn't like being run from any directory other than the directory it's installed in. So you're gonna want to create a shell script which does something like this:

cd /usr/local/emptriv
emptriv

Or something like that. I'm going to fix that in the next release of emptriv, but that might be a while from now because I'm working on adding text-to-speech support, and I'd like to port it to use the new vfdlib graphics routines as well.