Thanks for the help- that would have been a good thing to try. As it is, we're having guests over tonight and I wanted to show it off so I canned the system last night and did a full reinstall. Pretty cool that you can go from a zeroed harddrive to having home automation in 30 minutes or so. Afterwards, the i386 system booted and configured without a hitch. Incidentally, I stopped by a Kaleidescape dealer the other day just to see what they had to offer.... ended up walking out feeling pretty good that to get the basic system that I'm running at home would cost somewhere on the order of $100k from Kaleidescape. Cha-ching.
They may have one up on this project though- the guy I spoke with said that they could flush toilets using Crestron...
Well several Crestron customers we have recently spoken with seem to want to flush their systems down the toilet! But I am sure they are worth every penny ;-)
Andrew