Mini-HTPC that runs Debian?

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Dear all,

Now that with XBMC announcing support for Android devices, there seems to be
a great proliferation of small computers running Android >= 4 that are sold
to be used as HTPCs.

For example, I found the following to be interesting:

    https://dx.com/p/177875
    https://dx.com/p/176074

I am mostly asking this because my wife is threatening to kill me if,
according to hear, I don't give her something that is able to play games on
the TV (I don't quite get what is so special about the "on the TV", but I
think that it is better not to ask).

I couldn't care less for the games, but I do care for video playback,
especially those that I encode with handbrake (which was my motivation to
get it into Debian, as you can see in the git repo of the Debian multimedia
team).

OK, so, the questions:

1 - Is it possible (without too much pain) to run a Debian on these things?
2 - If it is possible, would one of these be useful as a mini buildd?
3 - Is it possible to run X on this? Would it be accelerated for video
    playback? What if I happened to grab the Android kernel (don't know how
    one would do this, since I have never used Android)?
4 - If I were not to tinker with these computers and content with only using
    Android for the games, which one should one prefer?

I think that the first device linked above has a "Vivante GC2000" GPU, while
the second has a Mali GPU.

If these computers listed above are not good, are there any recommendations
for a computer that would fit the 4th point (read: "the wife point") above,
but also allow me to install one Android program or another that I happened
to write?


Thanks a lot for any feedback that you may provide,


-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog : Projects : https://github.com/rbrito/
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br