Hi!

I'm considering a small project in which I'd use some very cheap & basic fanless VIA motherboard which has everything embedded in it. It would most likely have Unichrome GPU. How Linux-friendly are these things?
After my recent failure with otherwise very decent laptop (see sig) which frankly was the most Linux hostile piece of hardware I've ever experienced I'd thought it would be wiser to ask this time...

Most of these cheap VIA motherboard-cpu-systems have very good Linux support. Most of the hardware works out of the box. However it would be wise to actually pick the specific item and search on it to make sure.

There are lots of documentation and downloads on VIA's website:

http://www.viaarena.com/

Check especially the linux forum, downloads and articles. There is an EPIA-HOWTO by Andrew Howlett (easy to find on Google).

I am not sure if all features of the VIA boards eventually got full linux support. Some boards had hardware MPEG decoders which were the subject of controversy. There was a very active and helpful user community a few years ago but things may have moved on.

Recently VIA slashed their prices under the onslaught of Intel's mini-ITX celeron boards, and are even bundling Ubuntu:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5305482907.html

I guess you can't get much more linux-friendly than that.