BeagleBone

I got a BeagleBone playing SCALE poker, gave a talk about it at LiLAX.net which met at SpaceX, thanks Jok.  I have spent countless hours trying to learn how to do simple things like "screen /dev/beaglebone 115200" so I can even login to it, then I made the mistake of doing an opkg upgrade on the thing and messed up the Linux on it and got to spend some more time learning how the init system works on AngStrom Linux. Today I got the idea of maybe putting Gentoo on it and saying the hell with it, however I just realized that my only Gentoo system is quite old now and so is no doubt my knowledge of Gentoo. Gentoo Prefix sounds like an interesting idea:

The youngest member of Gentoo/Alt is the Gentoo Prefix project. It emerged from the Gentoo for Mac OS X project, which suffered from multiple practical problems initially. The core principle of Gentoo Prefix is that installation of packages by Portage are done in an offset, thereby leaving the host OS unmodified. As a side effect, administrative privileges are not required.

However I don't know if it is mature enough to try it, but it might be a fun diversion. I briefly considered maybe switching from OS X to Gentoo on the Mac, after all this hardware is getting slow, but reinstalling this OS X wouldn't be so easy :( without an install disk. Although maybe I could make a block copy to a USB drive, then install it from there, but wouldn't it make more sense to leave OS X where it is and install the Gentoo on the USB drive? That way the month or so I would no doubt spend getting things to work and learning how to do it, I would still have a working Mac.  However Gentoo might more happily live on one of those Windows laptops I have laying around.