I’ve never tried it, but there appear to be some rsync apps on f-droid, you could try.

Wow, what a short-sighted view. Android, despite its many shortcomings, gives you orders of magnitude more freedom in almost every way imaginable. And none of its shortcomings are blocking you from using it, rather more or less annoy you.

Mine too. I had to compile the drivers for a win modem (popularly called linmodem). Then switched to mandrake, mandriva, then Ubuntu 6 or 7, whichever came via mail for free.

Yes, com ports work way better than in windows. I’ve done a lot of embedded development on linux and it’s way more pleasant than in windows. One thing you do have to keep in mind is that access to com ports (USB and real) requires root access by default, but once you’ve set the udev rule up, it becomes accesible to normal users and/or group of users. After that, it works flawlessly. Android dev also works great and imo better than on win. Proprietary jtags may be an issue, but I’ve never actually had an unsolvable situation.