I've just released empeg-preinit. It is a small shim that lies under the normal empeg's init process that forks off any processes that might need to start on boot. It's fairly easy to install, not requiring a developer image, knowledge of the Unix shell, or a serial connection. It relies on Hijack versions v160 and higher (for their ability to find /sbin/hijack before and instead of /sbin/init).

It looks for the directory /etc/preinit.d (which the install creates), and runs any scripts found in that directory (in no particular order, which I'll fix in a future release). The programs in that directory must be bash scripts. They must return or the empeg will be hung upon boot, requiring an upgrade to be applied to the empeg to fix (I'll try to fix this in a future release). It should be easy to FTP new app startup scripts to the empeg at the same time as the app itself.

Any help with easing the install of this helper would be appreciated, and could probably be applied to future third party apps.