I can only use it through ethernet, right, or can I use it through serial?

Displayserver works over TCP/IP stack. It is there by default only using Ethernet as physical layer. There was talk about hacking PPP over USB, but I don't remember whether anybody actually did that. In days of MkI people got PPP running over serial (that's its main use, after all), but I don't believe its throughput is sufficient for Displayserver.

In other words, for all practical purposes displayserver works only over Ethernet (again, unless you have PPP over USB - on both ends, of course).

Does it really matter what IP address I use

If your network is on Internet (or an organized intranet, for that matter), you must assign empeg an IP address from the range that 'belongs' to your LAN. For example, if you use some kind of (semi-)permanent Internet connection (e.g. cable), then your ISP might have given you several IP addresses to use. Your empeg must then use one of these (unless it is behind NAT firewall - another can of worms ).

On the other hand, if you are not connected to any other network (or are connected through NAT (a.k.a. masquerading) firewall), you should use any address from one of several non-unique address ranges set aside specifically for that purpose. People usually use B-class range 192.168.xxx.xxx.

Simply put, assign addresses 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2 etc to all your devices, including empeg. Set network mask to 255.255.0.0. Switch DHCP, WINS and DNS off and manually edit hosts files. Set gateway address to empty or the address of the given unit itself. With such setup empeg should communicate with your PC(s). To make a PC gateway for empeg, so that it can be seen from the internet is somewhat more complicated.

Anyway, I am sure that a little search will reveal more informative threads on this topic than this feeble attempt.

One last one - as part of installing DisplayServer I had to set the drive to rw. Do I have to set this back myself or is this done on next reboot?

Music partitions will be mounted RO on next reboot. However, if you simply pull the plug with filesystems mounted RW, chances are that on next reboot it will be noticed and quite long-running fsck (filesystem check) will be automatically performed. In the worst case, if you pull the plug in the moment of a critical disk update, filesystem can be quite seriously corrupted (ext2fs is not a journaling filesystem - they are somehow slow in getting widespread use, although several are available for Linux).

So, do remount filesystems RO when finished updating them.

HTH. (If not - again, there is FAQ and plenty of better previous replies to similar questions )

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green