1. Logitech K400r is $33 from Logitech on eBay. This is a good little keyboard/touchpad combo, apparently pretty good in a htpc type situation where the ui lapses into pc keyboard and mouse.
2. I'm not sure this would work well enough, but I've been thinking about a Raspberry Pi based car simulator. A Pi with a basic steering wheel and pedal set (Thrustmaster Ferrari $80). Then I could retire my current screen to be a gaming screen. This would be for my little son, so a cool wooden cockpit would finish it off. Driving games (eg TORCS) for Linux aren't going to be hassle free (force feedback might not work, etc) but total cost below $200 would be pretty good, and a 3yr old can probably live without some things. Driving games are competitive but not murderous, a good model of social competition.
3. My 7790 continues to suck quite a good deal in Linux. I don't know whether its attributable to packaging, or the fact that the most up to date packages I can get for Ubuntu (the oibaf ppa) are not built on LLVM 3.4, the development version that provides stuff for GCN. But contra Phoronix enthuse and the driver Dev document, I have almost no high level features - no OpenGL, no VDPAU. A $25 Raspberry Pi frontend would easily outperform it.
Currently I believe the Pi-based simulator won't work (easily) because TORCS uses OpenGL, not OpenGL ES. Cubieboard has Android 4.2, and you could conceivably grab a racing sim game from the Play store for it - there are some doozies. GT2 is 0.9GB
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