I've also used FriendlyARM boards and did something like
this, although I didn't use an Emdebian root filesystem but installed the relevant files from it to a basic FriendlyARM root filesystem. You can also download Emdebian packages manually. What's very useful and shown in the page I linked is you can do everything on your x86-based computer with the help of qemu-usr-static/qemu-arm-static.
Hope that helps.
