I think that you should start out with something of the sub-netbook type.
These are the next generation and coming up very soon. For a home computer
you need at least dual core and at those speeds it will need a very low
price and small footprint.
If you could sneak in on the sub-net quick perhaps
one other idea (sorry)
Debian is not providing an altivec optimized version. If you want that you
have to go with Gentoo. If you were building cpu optimized from the ground
up with the libaltivec and perhaps the c++ altivec libraries (that require
translation for the changed library calls to all th