Hey folks,
Just to point out my post about the work we've been doing to have hw video decode and XBMC to work with a Pandaboard, using the Ubuntu Linaro Evaluation Builds.
http://rsalveti.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/hw-video-decode-and-xbmc-ubuntu-lin...
If you follow the instructions you should have hw video decode support and XBMC without any other step. At the moment there's still and annoying sink issue with XBMC, but we hope to get it fixed soon (at least once Rob Clark get a few spare cycles ;-).
We hope to also have a set-top box image by the end of this cycle, that should use XBMC by default.
Please give it a try and let us know about any other issue you may find.
Thanks,