I am planning on putting samba to run on Empeg among with a local ftpd type server plus the good old patched SSH1

Running Samba alone works fine, but running those three simultaneously might be a challenge, and practically impossible if you expect to run player at the same time.

a) access Empeg from any nearby laptop with a wavelan card, straight through normal windows networking (w2k / w9x) and for example have winamp play straight from a samba Empeg mounted disk.

Streaming files from empeg thru Samba is possible (if you don't run any other applications simultaneously) but playing music in WinAmp is probably quite uncomfortable as the filenames are just sequence of numbers and are not related to the music name (although the ID3 tags are available). Emplode is much more comfortable .

c) get logged on to the Empeg through a shell (love bash) and compile the kernel or mess around with the linux itself from afar with SSH, preferrably version 1 with the last security patches.

Forget compiling kernel inside empeg, it's way too big and has way too many dependencies. Compiling smaller projects is fine, as far as they don't use STL or other huge libraries.

I don't want to sound discouraging, but remember that empeg is not a file server - it does not have unlimited amount of memory and CPU power.

Kim