And yes, you can use it in "mouse mode" as well.

Wanted to follow up and let you know where I'm at so far. I ended up ordering the Dane-Elec pen as well as a Yi Fang mobile notetaker from eBay: http://bit.ly/THnwPL. I found the Yi Fang pen by going out to the "Products" page of the Pegasus website: http://www.pegatech.com/?CategoryID=218. I received the Yi Fang (eBay) pen and reader today, and it is indeed a Pegasus Mobile Notetaker under the hood. I used m210, and was able to convert my note sample from the usb reader into an SVG file relatively easily. OCRing it so far hasn't been a huge success, but I'm working on it. I'll post back when I have some more results to share.

Just picked one of these up: http://www.amazon.com/Dane-Elec-DA-DP1-01GC5-R-Z-PEN-Wireless-Digital/dp/B0013JHJWE/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_3 from Amazon Prime for $25. Don't know if it'll actually work under Linux or not, but the description is certainly promising: "This Viewer software runs on virtually all recent operating systems, from Windows 2000 onward, Mac OS and even most versions of Linux." Even if all you get is a flash drive that stores SVG/JPG/GIF/PNG, seems like you could write a udev handler that would recognize the drive, then call a script to scan it for new files and pass them off to an OCR program. Let's see how well this guy works when I get it.

Hear, hear! We have a rack that's a big rat's nest of cable boxes and IPTV gear. Most of the devices are single-powered, which means we can't take down a UPS for maintenance without taking them down (not a huge deal), plus they're just a rat's nest of cables. We also have a Mac mini in one of our racks that's attached into some sort of purpose-built chassis. Still's single-psu, though--not ideal for a datacenter unless it's part of a larger cluster.

Not really. NTP's such a lightweight service that it runs fine on a vm. As other posters have mentioned, you certainly don't want to use the system clock as your time source, but you shouldn't do that anyway. Hopefully you're syncing with an upstream provider that syncs from a non-computer-based source. See http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ntp.html for a good sync source (among many others). We've successfully virtualized NTP servers serving a 6000-person university.