Maybe we should make an image of an SD-install of SZ with some additional packages already installed (e.g. mc, gcc, etc), and with a bunch of PNDs on it too. It would be a card you can boot from, or just insert in a NAND-booted Pandora (but then you only get the PNDs, of course). Since it would probably be quite large, it's probably best to share it using a torrent.
Once this SD card image exists, all we need is a page with some easy-to-follow instructions on how to dump the image onto a card.
Or if you don't care about the SD card being bootable and, the "image" can be just a tarball of PNDs, which you just have to extract on an empty SD card.
Thinking out loud now:
Another approach would be to make a front-end for milkyhelper that can be used to create lists of PNDs, share those lists, and install them. That wouldn't be hard to make (it's mostly a matter of making a nice GUI for it). The idea is that you can easily create nice lists like "Selected homebrew games", "Recommended utitilies", "Popular emulators", put those lists online somehow, and then anyone with the tool can easily pick lists and download and install everything (or perhaps a subset of it).
The advantage of that approach is that it is more future-proof (if an update happens, there's no need to update some image).
Such a tool would be pretty nice to include in the first-boot procedure. Or maybe it could somehow be built into PNDManager.
Creating a list would just be a matter of selecting a subset of the PNDs you have installed on your Pandora, and writing the PND identifiers to some text file.
You could even have meta-lists that are collections of lists. A list would have an identifier just like a PND, so lists can refer to sublists. So you could have a "master" list, e.g. "EvilDragon's Pandora Setup for Reviewers", which contains sublists "Selected games", "Selected applications", "Selected emulators" and so on; some of these sublists could have sublists of their own. Once you have installed a list, it becomes a kind of "subscription" -- the list can be updated with new items, and when that happens, you will be asked if you want to download the new stuff.
In terms of implementation, the list could just be a PND, where the PXML file does not have any <application> section but some other tag to indicate that it is in fact a PND-list. The PND would contain nothing but a text file (say, called "list") with a list of PND identifiers, and maybe an icon. So it would also have an author and a title and a version and so on, and it could just be uploaded to the repo without needing to modify anything on the server side (well, except that it would have to validate PXML without an <application> section). The only thing that would need to change is PNDManager, which would need to handle such PND-list files.
A basic handler for PND-lists would just download everything on the list -- I guess that could even be done with some shell script that passes the list to milkyhelper or something like that. A nice handler for PND-lists could have a gui that shows the list and its sublists in a tree view, and lets you tick or untick some of the boxes to customize your selection (the list itself would have some default setting). Your selection could be saved in the appdata dir of the list, for future reference, when an update happens -- so it only proposes to download PNDs that are in a sublist branch that you had selected.
