This was built to be a "media machine," running Debian and XBMC. It's tiny, a tiny fraction the size of the old servers (tucker and bellman).
Configuring the Zotac ZBOX remote control
This is presently a "note for future"; I am using phone/tablet as remote control at present, which has been working fine.
I will observe that when I installed lirc (which is the software which this extends to support more of the Zotac remote control's buttons), I could not start up XBMC; in looking at logs, it got into a perpetual loop waiting for the lirc daemon to respond. So it seems likely I'll have to be pretty intent on making it work in order for it to work.
Sound. Sound. Sound.
Wee rant. I am perpetually finding sound, on Debian, to be an excruciating pain to configure, filled with weeping, gnashing of teeth, searching for documentation, and then a nice dose of doing somewhat random things until something, I'm never sure exactly what, clears things up so sound finally works.