I have been trying to get ROS installed on one of my RoBoards (Vortrx86 based SBC, www.roboard.com) similarly to Taylor Veltrop.  I ran into a few difficulties and while fixing them have created a new install of Ubuntu on the RoBoard.  As I was tinkering with this, I ended up building a light fast install based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server with the newest Vortex86 kernel installed.  I put X on it and installed Awesome window manager (very small, light and can be run with or w/o a mouse).  I have ROS Diamondback installed (and working) and the RoBoIO v1.7 library compiled and installed as a Shared Library (RoBoIO.so).  Works like a champ ... low memory and processor load and is only 2.75 GB on an 8 GB partition.  I have made a CloneZilla image of it and thought if anyone was interested I would post it on my server for download.  With CloneZilla it is very easy to install to the RoBoard with a 2 GB USB stick (the image is 1.1 GB).  You just install CloneZilla to to the USB stick, copy the image to the /home/partimg directory, boot on the USB and follow the instructions.  The image is for an 8 GB disk, so you will need at least an 8 GB microSD card.

Jim