It turns out that using qemu to emulate a whole mips-linux build environment is far easier than trying to get either openembedded or buildroot to work.
http://bellard.org/qemu/mips-test-0.2.tar.gz tar zxvf mips-test-0.2.tar.gz qemu-img create disk_hda 1G qemu-system-mipsel -kernel vmlinux-2.6.18-3-qemu -initrd initrd.gz -append console=ttyS0 -nographic -net nic -net user -m 128 -hda disk_hda # debian-installer