If you were not aware - O2 last week reduced the price of the O2 Joggler from £149.99 to £99.99 to £49.99.  Nothing remarkable in price reductions, however what is remarkable is what you actually get for your money.

The O2 Joggler is a silent 7" touchscreen device with Intel Atom Z520 running at 1.3Ghz, 512Mb ram, 1GB internal flash storage with additional storage available via an external USB port. What makes the device really exciting is that it also has a 1GB ethernet (Realtec 8168) and Wifi.

Looking at that - I know you're all thinking "linux box" - but conveniently, the default operating system on it is based on Ubuntu 8.04 and busybox, The frontend is a custom flash driven UI developed by OpenPeak (makers of the Jogger which is rebadged by O2).

There are plenty of clever individuals over at http://hackthejoggler.freeforums.org/and in the #mer channel on freenode who are working to allow the Joggler to run other Operating Systems such as Android, Ubuntu Netbook Edition, MID, even Windows and OSX.

However, the standard OS supplied is also pretty powerful and allows significant customisation.  You can enable telnet just by turning it on with a custom USB stick plugged in. To do some of the things I'll be describing here you will need to have started with that.

Once you can telnet in, the world opens up and you can do lots of things that you would expect* to be able to do in a linux system. (* except run a web browser.... at this time - we don't have web access with the stock OS due to the custom flash GUI interface.)

Lets install some useful utilities, how about perl, terminfo, irc clients, bit torrent, rsync, ssh/scp ?   Yes, I know what you're thinking - overnight silent downloads - no need to leave PC on... nice...

I've built several of these utilities with installation instructions and uploaded them over here: 
  http://ubu05.pgregg.com/joggler/

Feel free to download, examine, install etc.  Read the README on the download page - it explains how to do it. Most of the packs include an install.sh script that will provide an installation safety net - it won't overwrite existing files or libraries.

Usual disclaimers apply - you try these applications at your own risk. I accept no responsibility if you manage to brick, fry or otherwise trash your joggler.

Comments, suggestions for other applications are always welcome.

Update: Thanks to NP - seems I was a little too brutal with the library stripping to keep the download sizes small and I missed some required libraries (that I mistakenly thought were in the standard Joggler distro).   I have rebuilt the following packages as they were missing some libs: rtorrent, rsync, sudo,ssh
The screen package has been rebuilt too to add one final tweak (to the installer script) so it can be used by non-root users - the only difference you need to do is run the command: chmod 666 /dev/ptmp /dev/tty