It took me a while to do it, but I finally got the shell:
Flash&pump the developer code onto the empeg in Windows
Boot Linux, get two windows up, run minicom in one (115200,8,N,1,No handshake) and a shell
Plug the empeg power in - should get Linux boot messages and player should start
Do echo pipe to serial port as per Hugo's post in the shell
You should see a few control chars, in minicom and the player should exit dropping you to a bash shell
There isn't a great deal to see, /proc has some interesting stuff, but randomly cat'ing this and devices in /dev you can easily get your terminal into a state which requires a reboot.
Didn't manage to get vi to work - needs a TERM environment variable setting, tried linux and vt100, but no luck. df seemed to complain that it couldnt find some file, but fstab is in /etc/ like you'd expect.

The empeg code seems to be all in one big file. I was hoping that the modules would be seperate so the MP3 decoder etc could be called individually by scripts etc. I s'pose the empeg guys will publish an API for the player, when they get a chance.

Looks like the only way to get files to/from the empeg at the mo is rz/sz which are in /bin. I guess later on we'll get pppd, telnetd etc ported.
Where's a good place to get gcc etc from? Is it a standard ARM one available from the debian/netwinder site?

Phil