Okay. Another way to capture the strace log locally on the empeg, is to install a second drive, which is not formatted for empeg use.
So basically start with a blank second (slave) drive -- no partitions, and boot into the empeg software. Hit control^C to kill off the player and get a command prompt.
At the command prompt, format the drive. Use as small a drive as you have available to you, because the larger the drive, the slower this step will be:
mke2fs /dev/sdb ## and say "y" when prompted
Then, mount it r/w:
mkdir /t ; mount /dev/sdb /t
If that works, then you can try the strace, without the rwm:
/strace player &> /t/strace.log
And afterwards use FTP to retrieve /t/strace.log from the empeg to a PC.
Cheers