While I was away on my honeymoon the team at Canonical released version 8.04 LTS of their Ubuntu Linux operating system for both the desktop and server.

As it is a Long Term Support (LTS) released, their desktop version will be supported until 2011 and the server version will be supported until 2013. This means you'll continue to receive patches and updates to the system for a very long time, and means businesses can feel comfortable knowing their investment in Ubuntu Linux is protected.

We will be upgrading our servers, where necessary, in the coming weeks. You can get your copy now, for free.

... and I will have a wife.

Now the excitement juice is starting to flow.

No. Should I be?

I've decided that next month I'm going to write about highly controversial topics.

You've been warned, so if you think you might be offended, tune out for a while.

Back in January I emailed the development team about reports coming out of E3 about a new project from Shuttle: a mini PC that looked really cool, had a very low price-point and was expected to pack a decent punch.

This isn't anything new - Shuttle have dominated the micro PC market for as long as there's been a micro PC market, but this product looked different. 

Well a few months have passed and it's now available in the market place. It's called the Shuttle KPC and by all accounts the design and engineering teams have delivered on their respective promises.

The boxes come in several configurations, including a bare-bones system. You can choose from four colours (red, white, blue, black) each with slightly different logos. The white one has a coffee cup logo - the perfect low-spec Java applicaiton server?

They're designed for the office (KPC is an acronym for Korporate Perfect Cube) and ship with Foresight Linux. There was talk of them shipping with Ubuntu but that's not the case, though I'm sure it'd run Ubuntu just fine. The lack of optical drive means you'll need to install via USB stick (one of the options includes the necessary USB keys) over via netboot, which I presume is supported by the gigabit network card.

They're now for sale through NewEgg or from Shuttle directly, and Tom's Hardware has a really indepth review (as you'd expect).

Because of the unassuming size of these machines I think they'd make ideal web application servers for some of our customers. They're fully Linux compatible and come with decent hardware specs which would make them a perfect LAMP server for applications serving 50 or so users. Also, becuase it doesn't look like a computer people wouldn't touch it. That was one of the benefits of the SGI O₂ we used for data warehousing at Western Power - people didn't know what it was so they left it alone. Most people thought it was a bread-maker.