Hello all. I haven't read the entire thread so what I'm about to write may be off.
@quispie12, you mentioned you wanted OE images; did you mean pre-built images? I just discovered that I have 3 OE images on one of my backup folders. These were built in 2011 when I was experimenting and had a fully functional OpenEmbedded build environment.
I believe I was able to build 3 different images (with different levels of support). They're named:
* rom-chumby-silvermoon-console-image.img
* rom-chumby-silvermoon-xorg-image.img
* rom-chumby-silvermoon-x11-image.img
Since they are images, each of them is 376Megs in size. It has been a while but I'm pretty sure they were functional and did not exhibit the read-only error you describe. Unfortunately the OE build environment I had is long gone so I can't sift through it for any notes. All I have are the binaries.
Let me know if you need them and I'll find a way to get them to you.
On another note, I had a Lenny chroot working a few years ago that I just recently tried to get working again, but since Lenny is no longer supported I'm unable to update and retrieve packges. So I made another chroot environment but this time with Squeeze (which has also reached end of life but is still available). That one seems to work decently well (except for some bizarre issues with apt).
I hope to make some time and do a proper writeup on the updated procedure and work-arounds for Squeeze and Wheezy some time soon. But I abandoned experimenting with Wheezy once I discovered I could not get mpd to run (segmentation fault).
Oh, and one more thing. I too encountered lots of issues with getting touchscreen (and X and other software) to play nice with one another. I discovered that most of the issues were due to having an improper environment variable for the device (can't recall off the top of my head).