So far, I am LOVING this board! It is SO much easier to get up and running then the Raspberry Pi. Plus, it's faster and it's headers make a hell of a lot more sense.
Yes, I had to do the HDMI fix. Once done, I can use an Apple HDMI-to-DVI adaptor on an old Samsung SyncMaster 243T LCD with no problem.
I'm running it off of the same power supply I was using with the Raspberry Pi, an iPhone USB wall charger and a Sparkfun Cerberus USB cable. No problems so far
Yes, I can play video in youtube... but it's a bit jerky... Though I'm not sure if that's my internet connection or not. I'll be doing a bit more research over the next day or so.
To power cycle the thing, you can run sudo shutdown -h now ... and then press the reset button to reboot the board. This is a LOT nicer then the Raspberry Pi's power solution. Once you drop the Pi to halt, you can't get it back unless you physically power cycle the thing. Bleh. 10 second shutdown or so.... pretty nice :)
A little less then 30 seconds for a cold boot. And at least 10 seconds of that looks like X getting off the ground. I haven't actually checked that though... It would be nice if we could figure out how to get textual boot on these things... anyone?
SSH is NOT running by default! dnsmasq (on port 53) is the only thing running on it by default.
I suggest getting some standoffs for this thing... It's got a good number of chips on the bottom of it... and having it up off the table is probably a pretty good idea. It'd be great if someone could throw together a simple Thingiverse plexiglass case/bottom plate for the thing...
Hitting the reset button seems to do an APCI reboot. Not just a cold reset like the Arduino's reset button does... So that's good!
The screensaver on mine doesn't start "very quickly" after first boot... so I don't know why people are seeing that but whatever.
And, finally, YES it will boot all the way to a desktop with JUST an HDMI and power cable plugged in!
I love this thing! Now if only sparkfun had a "car computer power supply" that would run off of 12 volts and not fry during a starter motor crank...