I bought a couple of EPIA 5000 motherboards when they were first released (in 2003 I think) for the same reason as you. I've got them in Cubid 2688 cases with 60 watt power supplies. They work a treat and actually use only about about 25 to 26 watts of power most of the time, even with a 3.5 disc drive. These days you could probably get even lower power consumption if you used a large flashcard instead of a hard disc.
They work well with Linux. Mine originally had Suse 6.x installed but over the years they've been upgraded and presently I'm using Suse 9.2. (I haven't felt the need to move them up to Suse 10.x yet.) The Via CPU chips are slower than an Intel chip with the same clock rating though. My EPIA 5000's are very slow if I try to use a heavywight GUI such as KDE or Gnome, but thats probably partly because I only have 128MB memory installed in them.
Cheers, Alan.
