Given the variety of el cheapo netbooks (new and 2nd hand) I'm thinking about converting one into a dedicated Amiga Forever portable.

Anybody got experience with Amiga Forever? My understanding is that the DVD you buy is bootable, and boots into a customised Linux distro that instantly loads your Amiga frontend.

My questions:
- Can you install the bootable DVD onto a dedicated HD?
- Does it only work with x86 based CPUs?
- Any suggestions with regard to the hardware side of things?

Games would be my main goal... but I'd also just be able to re-live the nostalgia of booting into Workbench and living the nostalgia without having to own the original (bulky) hardware.

Any suggestions would be grand.

I can't answer any of your questions, but I do have a couple of suggestions for other things to investigate.

Ever heard of AROS? It's one of the many Amiga offshoot operating systems. It runs on x86 hardware and is compatible—or at least aims to be—with Amiga OS 3.1 at the API level. It also comes in a pre-configured flavour, thanks to Icaros Desktop.

There are also ruminations of an official Amiga netbook coming "soon." No signs of it yet, but I believe AmigaOS 4 has classic Amiga emulation built right in—so that could be an option if you're willing to wait for something that might drop in a month, a year, or five years.

Amiga Forever would probably still be the easiest way to get the old software/games, though.