Pengutronix OSELAS (http://www.pengutronix.de/oselas/toolchain/index_en.html) is the most polished cross-compiler build system I've found.

The Nokia N810 is remarkably similar to the Kindle in terms of base hardware and a very convenient bootstrapping tool.

qemu-arm's SCSI drivers are very cranky. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu has a decent writeup of how to do an NFS-rooted ARM-linux system, but http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogra/arm/qemu/ has the ubuntu images I found useful.

The Kindle's kernel has baked in NFS and Ext3 drivers.
Thanks for the tip! Nothing is worse than trying to roll your own toolchain.
Actually, Building Qt 4 times on a Kindle is. I wish I did not know that.
God, I wish cross-compilation wasn't such a joke.
good exprement