[scOOtt]

I bought the Minix Neo X5 and I love it so far. Lots of stuff to mess with and plenty of ports. I've had bad luck trying to run XBMC Live on a PC. First machine would commonly corrupt the main partition when my wife tried to watch DVDs on the DVD drive (no matter how much I tried to tell her to stop doing that and I figured I'd upgrade it soon anyway). So I upgraded the box to an AMD Fusion and after a few weeks it quit booting. Now I just want a decent piece of hardware that I can run XBMC on. The Neo X5 has bluetooth (so I can pair wiimotes and PS3 controllers to it out of the box), wireless/wired networking, eSata port, 3 USB ports...so far running emulators on it has been pretty flawless. Heat is pretty much a non-issue and hardware acceleration seems good for the one PS1 game I played. My biggest disappointment (after the lack of XBMC hardware acceleration) is that the Hulu Plus app doesn't work yet. I tried accessing Hulu Plus through PlayOn and it just crashes when I try to watch a show (I get all the way to selecting the episode...hit play...crash).

Yes...I could configure an external player, but apparently it doesn't support watching movies over a Samba share unless I mount it to the file system. Since I have multiple shares for my stuff, this would be annoying...esp if I lose it every time I update firmware. I can't even find decent instructions on how to mount a windows file share to the Android OS that will automatically reconnect after reboots (Google is usually pretty helpful in this regard).

Once XBMC is sorted out and stable, I can finally decommission my old Asus O!Play.

I was able to decommission many of my XBMC devices with the Pivos Xios DS (officially supported by XBMC).. Its not a very powerful device, but if you replace the android firmware with the linux firmware, it runs great, even for 1080p.

I'm affraid on Neo X5 there are no option to install any kind of Linux distribution. You have to stick with Android.