The only thing you can't do without the serial cable is perform software updates. You will be able to load music over the ethernet cable, so for day to day use you won't need to worry. As long as you don't live more than 50 miles from a PC that you have access to, your best bet is to use a PC to install the latest 2.0 Beta (13) and the hijack kernel. Both are available from the links at the top of the board. You may not want hijack now, but you'll never noice it's there untill you want to play with it, and if you install it while you're on the PC you'll be able to update it over ethernet with jemplode.

Using this method, you'll still have to hunt up a PC every once in a while for Sonic Blue(tm) software releases, but that doesn't happen all that frequently.

Matthew