> what's the easiest way to transfer files on and off the machine? Just stick the SD card in another machine. There has to be a FAT partition for booting; or you can access the fossil partition if you have an sd card reader on a plan 9 machine.
You can boot the rpi as a cpu server networked via ppp, but it's painfully slow. In theory the uart will go up to 3Mb/s, but you need something on the other end that can keep up.
