UPDATE: Here ist the serial output, just the player apps seems to fail. The VFD shows "Starting idle poll thread failed":

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player

hijack: removed menu entry: "Hard Disk Detection"
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-beta11 2002/02/08.
! player.cpp : 291:MainThread::Init failed!
Restored terminal settings
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Player exited normally: 0
Switching to shell-player loop
Starting bash.
empeg:/empeg/bin#
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the unit IS booting but with kernel 275 the player app fails to start. The last version that works for me is 273.

janosch