Ok, the Efika has arrived. Very neat little board - was surprised how small the box is.

I have a 2.5" HD on the way courtesy of Ebay, a spare Radeon 7k in my desk drawer, and just need to sort out some sort of PSU to get going.

Now is probably a good time to think about the OS requirements.

Judging by some of the comments on the developer forum, a full KDE or Gnome install is probably going to be a bit OTT for a processor of this class. Ditto OpenOffice. I therefore need to look into alternatives.

The main requirements as I see them are as follows:

1. Basic desktop functionality. Should be at least somewhat similar to Windows to make simplify things for users that haven't experimented with Linux before.

2. A system that obscures the Linux filesystem as much as possible - something that puts (or will allow me to put) the devices on the desktop so that users don't need to go digging around in /mnt/ or /dev/ to get access to their folders. Ideally, it would be nice to have disks mounted as (e.g.) /c-drive /usb-drive to make things really obvious.

3. The best NTFS support currently possible. A lot of the data collected on this system will probably end up being analysed in STATA or SPSS on windows (NB. need to find out whether there is a PPC version of STATA for linux), so external HD transfer needs to be as seemless as possible. Need to see how effective the newer NTFS compatibility solutions are.

4. An office suite. Basic word processing is important, but doesn't need all the bells and whistles. AbiWord is probably more than adequate. Presentation software might be useful, but isn't essential. A top-notch spreadsheet is essential. The one in OpenOffice is fine, but I'm not too familiar with the alternatives. I'd like to avoid using OO if there is a snappier (faster, smaller) alternative that has most of the necessary functions.

5. Minimal bloat. The best bet will probably be to start with a very, very basic debian install and add in only those packages necessary to get everything working as intended.

Will report back with suggestions as they come to me...