Even while the chumby service was down I would often pull these out to use as special purpose devices (eg. mpd servers for net radio), they are still pretty good small linux boxes that go great with Go development.
Are you aware of what the best current linux firmware is for the Silvermoon (8") platform? The OpenEmbedded versions I've seen are fairly old released from when the devices first went on sale, and I'd love to make use of them.
It would theoretically be possible to get a 3.x kernel up by forward-porting the divergent patches between that OE kernel and the linux kernel version from that time, but I'm not aware of any current working code for that. Due to the changes in the kernel, it wouldn't be trivial to do.