Well for starters, none of the hacking you do is going to damage your music files or your player's hardware. No matter how much you screw up an Empeg Linux kernel, unless you specifically program the kernel to overwrite all your music, you cannot damage anything important. The most you would have to do is re-flash an Upgrade file, which can be done even if your Empeg's kernel is unbootable. After the upgrade, everything is back to normal.

Having said that, if editing config.ini is about as far as you want to go with your own hacking, then you have to depend on some of the kernels that others have compiled and made available. The IR trans kernel is set up very nicely in that it's already got Pioneer codes in there by default. So you wouldn't need to do any compiling or anything, you'd just need to grab the kernel image from Frank's site, un-archive it (WinZip can extract tar.gz files.) Furthermore, Tony Fabris' Logo Editor makes the process of uploading a kernel pretty easy. Take a look at Frank's instructions and see if you think you'd be okay with following the steps he's listed, and remember, if you screw up, it's just a 20 minute or so setback to re-flash an upgrade file.

In summary, one need not be a hacker to install other peoples' hacks.