Currently Im hosting 2 domains off my plug and have never had a problem.  Mostly it is for personal use (ssh and a couple of web apps) but sometimes Ill put files up for friends and family to grab.  The plug has plenty of power to handle a lot more traffic though.

Ive been running my plug with debian and apache2 for at least a year now with no problems.  Recently I switched it to use virtual hosts and its been great.

I would start here:
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/
for the debian install.  I believe this guy is a member this board too.  Apache should be pretty straight forward to install once the base OS is up and running.

I cant think of anything other than number crunching that a cluster would be good for.  Since the plug lacks a FPU it would not be a great option.

A-DATA Class 6 TurboSD SDHC 16G appears to be resulting in a corrupted file system with ext2.  Been using it in my Asus eeepc 701 for about a year now with no problems.

Currently running the OS on OCZ Diesel 16GB Single Channel Flash Drive Model OCZUSBDSL16G and appears to be alright.  Had a few problems during boot initially but was fine the last few reboots.

Will have to snag another SD soon.

Yes have patience, you will probably be in the next batch.

Ordered April 22.  No plug and no reply from my email to customer support a few days ago.  Oh wells, I suspect Ill be in the next shipment.

Very nice information.  Thanks for sharing.

Uncomment the following line:
# auth       sufficient pam_wheel.so trust

Add yourself to the group wheel which may need to be created if it does not exist.

Also look at file /etc/pam.d/su and see if anything sticks out there.

Yes this problem is intruiging.  What does 'su -l root' result in?

What about 'sudo -s'?  It should give the same results.

I suppose not running the network start up script is in fact a bad idea as a lot of stuff relies on the loop back interface (lo).  Under /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts edit ifcfg-eth0 and set ONBOOT=no. 

And sorry if this is the wrong path.  I dont have my ubuntu box on again and only have access to CentOS boxes atm.  'find / -name ifcfg-eth0' should get the path for you.

Dont have a fix for you as I dont have my ubuntu box on atm but http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/jaunty/main/binary-armel/Packages is indeed not there.

Packages.gz and Packages.bz2 are there though.

Try removing /etc/init.d/network from startup?  Look at the update-rc.d command for usage.