In the meantime if anyone wants to try the africa install an accessible linux distro and report back on how it works that'll be great. if I get the money over christmas I'll probably buy myself a cherrypal africa to play with. hopefully it will let me wipe the hard drive and install grml, vinux cli or knoppix adriane. I know that ubuntu and vinux gui won't work because they need too much memory but I think adriane and the command line interface or console accessible linux distributions aught to work fine.