Well, being a "dive right in kinda guy", I rooted my new NC within minutes of arriving home, fresh from B&N, and Fry's for a mini SD and reader. So following the great posts here and at nookDevs: I charged, initially booted, DL'd & installed the 1.1.0 upgrade - so far so good. I DL'd the win32diskimage, and the auto-nooter 3.0.0, put the image on the mini SD - check I powered down the NC, installed the SD, and plugged (USB) the NC into the PC - now we're cookin'. After a few moments, I get a boot and an android image - so far so good. Here is where I lost understanding..... I was able to take out the SD and run through the wizard(?), but couldn't reconcile the screens with the instructions. (admittedly, I had/have limited understanding of SoftKeys). So, I see the softkeys, but when I try to use them I get "unable to run as root" messages. I poke around for a 10-15 minutes exploring, registering my gmail, etc. Eventually, I get a dialog box from softkeys asking if it can run as root. Once I ok that, the soft buttons seem to work fine. All's well, then, in the end - reasonably successful root experience. Still need to sort through what I want to do with loader, soft keys, etc, etc. I'm half tempted to reset back to stock, and root it with out auto-noot, just for the experience.
Not sure why, but this made me laugh out loud for the first time since RaVenJ talked about licking cereal boxes.