Regarding selling my old box... I'm probably going to keep it for a bit, at least until I have the EPIA machine working well.
For interface, I have been using an X-10 remote with my own X-10 software to interact with the jukebox software I wrote, but I think I'm going to toy with using IR on the new box. I'm basically not interacting with the desktop in general, just my mp3 client application. I'm running FreeBSD pretty much everywhere, except for one linux development box, a Powerbook and a G4 tower. The one bad thing about the EPIA board is that there's only one serial port, I might wind up buying a serial port card at some point so I'll still have a port to talk to my Sunfire receiver. My mp3 jukebox software has a CORBA interface, so I can just fire up the mp3 control client on my laptop, but the laptop isn't convenient to recharge like a good remote control and doesn't have a lot of battery logevity. It also isn't horribly fun to use in a reclined position. :-) The output went via S-video on the old box, I suspect I'll do the same with the EPIA. Audio went analog, on the new box I hope to use the S/PDIF (no idea if the OSS drivers will work). The box is powered 7x24 because the jukebox software multicasts on my LAN and I listen from other machines with zinf (and recently an RTP-enabled version of xmms). Hence the move to a VIA EPIA board... I'd like to cut back on the power consumption. The jukebox software uses very little CPU, maybe 5 minutes a day running 3 separate multicasts and the associated control servants (which handle searching, queueing, and upload/download of mp3 files to/from the jukebox).
I started writing the jukebox software a few years ago in my spare time. I haven't worked on it much in a while, in part because it does what I need it to do and has been rock-solid stable for a year. The plan was to release it under a BSD-style license, I just haven't gotten around to it. It's using omniORB for CORBA (and JacORB in the case of the java client, which I rarely use), and a modified liveMedia library for multicast. It's also using id3lib (for tag handling), Qt (for the native client), and I forget what else (my point being it's probably a license quagmire for anyone who'd want to make money from it :-)).
