I'm posting this only because I did a search on internettablettalk as well as a review of maemo.org's wiki and couldn't find what I was after.

Specifically, I work in a place where the IT department gives new meaning to the word "paranoia". Consequently, when I want my desktop machine to talk to my N800 via Wifi, it won't happen due to the blocked ports, etc. So I sought an IP connection over USB with my desktop WinXP machine.

At first, I thought this would help me. Well, actually, since I just edited it, it now does. But before I edited it, it didn't have enough information. Specifically, the N800 (more precisely, the bora distribution) has a handy control panel (maemo-statusbar-usbnet) to let one choose what the N800's USB port emulates, MMC storage or USB-ethernet. So visit that link and get set straight.

After following the steps, my desktop machine has a TCP/IP connection with my N800 at blazing speeds, and in a manner which doesn't offend my idiotic IT overlords. Presumably a similar happy result can be obtained with maemo-statusbar-usbnet and desktop Linux hosts, but I haven't tried it yet.

[edited 29-may-07 to repair the above link]

Does this work behind a router? Your link is broken, but thanks for the info!

Well, actually im looking more forward to a ethernet-usb adapter sort of solution..

excellent!! so do share how you did it!

OK, well it looks like I have to back-pedal a bit. It appears that our IT people have pushed a policy preventing RNDIS networking. So what worked at home doesn't work at my office desktop.

Furthermore, it appears that the maemo-statusbar-usbnet control panel applet isn't "ready for prime-time". After booting, I find I'm able to switch the USB mode to usbnet, but a hang-followed-by eventual-reboot happens when I try to set the mode back to mmc-storage. See bug #1375 for a detailed description (link requires Bugzilla registration).

Sorry for the premature excitement...