Quoting Toby Corkindale (toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au):
If you're serious about playing with small, low-power embedded-style devices, get the BeagleBone. The Linux support is excellent, there's lots of hardware you can add to it, and it has a million i/o methods.
On a vaguely related matter, I'm looking into replacing the 2001-era VA Linux Systems model 2230 2U rackmount server running my main Internet presence (shell for me and a bunch of other people, Web, ftp[1], SMTP, Mailman mailing lists, DNS, ntp, rsyncd), with a fit-PC3. Primary advantage of the latter, other than accomplishing a generally necesary hardware refresh, is a great reduction in use of mains power. And noise production. Old New Est. total power draw 100W 15W CPU PIII/650 AMD G-T40E/1GHz[2] Physical RAM 1.5GB 8.0GB Disk space 89GB ~1TB I'll be going from 3 count of internal 3.5" SCSI drives to 1 internal SSD + a RAID1 pair of external 2.5" drives on eSATA, and going from three fans to none. Old: http://ebayimages.rswhost.com/301735/73414D.jpg New: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/images/fit-PC3-standard-front.jpg A good bit more money than a Beaglebone, but OTOH fully featured and enough server firepower for another decade. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Network_Other/ftp-justification.html [2] AMD G-series ('Geode') approximates Intel Atom, and is x86_64 arch.