Also, what good is the miner without this 'control board' .. what does the 'controller' do? is it simply a raspberry pi or like?
As I understand it, you can use the miners with any linux, if you compile/use (customized) cpuminer od cgminer.
Even a Windows PC should do the work.
The board is a small ARM based linux computer so you dont need any aditional hardware.
This is my understanding.