So if one wanted to do a little hacking, what package would you recommend? I intended to do all sorts of crazy shit with my Chumby but I never did...
right now the fashionable ARM boards are: * panda board (omap4) [1]
* beagle board (omap3) [2]
* trimslice (tegra2) [3]
* arndale & chromebook (exynos5) [4]
* cubieboard (allwinner a10) [5] I've got all of these boards, and I like the pandaboard the most, then the trimslice.
For opensource events the one I use to demo fedora is usually the pandaboard.
That is because Texas Instruments did the best job at upstreaming the kernel code, so it works the best. The cubiboard is nice, it is the same SoC in the mk802 [6]... which is close to the price point of the Raspberry PI except is WAY much more powerful. I guess the question to you is what do you want to do? Do you plan to use any kind of GPIO pins, to say... use LEDs or interface to something else? Or would you be happy with just video output? [1] http://www.omappedia.com/wiki/PandaBoard
[2] http://beagleboard.org/
[3] http://trimslice.com/
[4] http://www.arndaleboard.org/
[5] http://cubieboard.org/
[6] http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/
Let's be honest... at this point, I want an HTPC that doesn't suck. Tweaking with other stuff would be awesome, but I just don't have time to play hacker. The pi was appealing because it was just enough hackery to make me feel 1337 without any of the actual effort involved in doing something real. There's probably a Roku that will do what I need for cheaper than the Pandaboard. I'm sure I can come up with reasons to do something more bitchin' than that, but I'd have to reach. Does that make sense?
No idea what htpc means or what a roku are. Regardless.... many boards I'm sure could fit your needs. Id suggest the mk802 since you probably wont be needing gpio pins.. the arm soc for those will be in mainline linux in the next few months... supported now in somebodys github