Beagle Board Carputer

In case you haven't heard, Texas Instruments and Digi-Key have come together to create an amazing product called the Beagle Board.

What's so amazing you ask?

For a mere 150 dollars, you can get an entire computer. Albeit you have to do a lot of work to get it up and running.

Carputer systems are not a very popular mod for obvious reasons. You have to rig up a power supply, have a touch screen or voice activated interface, run the sound to your speakers, etc etc.

However, I am going to take on this challenge. Well, I'm going to wait until spring, but then I'm talking on this challenge.

Probably the most important thing I need to decide is what operating system I'm going to run on it. It can't be a conventional operating system because of the ARM architecture. That does leave me with a few things though. I could go with Windows CE (yeah right) or Android (a good possibility) or I could build it my self from Gentoo or Debian (Gentoo has a much better chance).

What I'm really hoping for is an Arch Linux port to ARM by the time I start my project. Some progress has been made over at Arch Mobile but it looks like the project may have died.

Oh well, I guess I can live with Gentoo or Android if I have to.

So let's over the two most likely options, here are some Pros and Cons:

Gentoo

Pros
I'll be able to build it how I want.
It'll be highly optimized and incredibly fast and compact.
Incredible documentation.

Cons
I've done a Gentoo install in a VirtualBox. It takes forever... I can't imagine how long it'll take on an ARM processor

Android

Pros
Already set up.
Probably easy to install.

Cons
Can't use Google apps (you have to have a license) this includes the app store.
Not sure how I'd compile programs on to it.
I don't think the interface would be that great as a carputer.

Ah well, I got plenty of time to come up with a solution.