Flashing openlink went alright (takes ages though. It’s not kidding about doing it over a crossover cable and it’s terrifying doing it from XP).
Somehow /dev/console isn’t created, which has, er, interesting consequences but is easily fixed .
Adding NFS was a doddle (keeping uids in sync is another story but what’s new).
Multicast DNS works when it feels like it (mDNSresponder ships with a handy admin tool called ‘kill -9’); might play with the toolchain and have a go at rolling my own.
Disappointed that the eMac doesn’t do NFS service discovery – that looked like a really neat hack. Perversely, the Mac seems to find and mount Samba more easily than Appletalk so I’ve given in; once I shovel a few Gb of MP3s out of the way I’ll Tiger it up and see if that’s any smarter.
(UPDATE: it is. NFS is way faster than Appletalk or CIFS too.)