Amiga inc are mental, and if it's true (which I'm sure it is) that Adam whateverthehell refused to pay Jens for components, just write it off. The board will be an overpriced pile of wank anyway.
As for a *nix OS, I've always preferred starting with the bare minimum then building up to get my OS using tools like pkgsrc in netbsd or the ports collection in linux / free bsd. This way I know exactly whats going on.
Distros are hideous, theres too much bundled crap, everything is usually put in bizzare places and as a result you never really know exactly what's going on.
