Don’t even ASK how goddamn long it took (note the timestamp on this post), but there it is, up and running with everything configured properly:
That one’s yours, Josh. Gonna do something different with mine, I think. And ET’s getting his still sealed in the original box, so he can have the same fun I had. I’ll sell him my HOWTO for an extra $50 
Woohoo!
How quiet and fast is that thing?
Well, the only sound is the spinning of the hard drive. When I set up mine I’m going to play around with hdparm and maybe laptop-mode to spin the drive down and keep it spun down when I’m not actively using the system.
As for speed, well, it’s no speed demon but I find it acceptable for a basic web/email/IM platform. I’m going to play around with some tweaks and see how much performance I can squeeze out of it; up until now I’ve been devoting all my energies to figuring out installation and configuration issues (there were several showstoppers along the way).
http://jsco.org/dectop/
Yeah, except his HOWTO is for a year-old version of Xubuntu, doesn’t work with the current version, and doesn’t fully configure the system…