oof, I hope you get through your network issues soon. Would be interesting to here what your problems were so we can try to solve them for future users.

As for the battery, there is a discussion on that at http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=13. Basically, adding a reasonable battery with good performance would add too much to the cost of the device, as the target sales price is around $150. However, since it is open source, you are more than welcome to add a battery yourself