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I recently helped my roommate shop for a small, personal web server.  We wound up basing it on Intel’s Atom platform, and I was amazed at how cheap it was.  The server (pictured above) came up to almost exactly $200, including shipping, and has a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 512MB of Memory, and an 80GB hard drive.  It runs Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition.

The motherboard is a Mini-ITX form factor board, so the whole server is pretty small.  It has a low power consumption, with the Atom CPU using only 4W of electricity.  For anyone looking to host their own web page, the Atom is a great way to do it.  So far, the box has handled everything we’ve thrown at it quite nicely.  It’s running a LAMP server to host a few personal sites.

If you’re willing to spend a bit more (close to $300 for the same specs) you can get the server down even smaller by using a slimmer case and laptop components.

With the cost of hardware dropping, I wonder if we’ll see devices like this mass marketed to the general public.  It’s mainly a matter of making a nice interface for it to easily allow setting up a photo or blog site. Imagine a desktop application that would allow a user to type up a blog post, upload photos, etc., then automatically upload that content to the server.

If anyone’s curious, the hardware we bought is here.  The motherboard is currently out of stock, however, as Intel has released a dual core version.  I’ll update the wishlist when Newegg gets the new board in.

See if you can spot it…

What a Deal!

There’s been a fair amount of news online about Canonical’s specialized version of Ubuntu for Atom based laptops, but the current word on it is that Canonical will only be licensing it directly to OEMs.  However, there is a PPA that you can use to turn an Ubuntu Hardy install into UNR.

Just add the repository and install the applications that it contains, then log out and in and set up your new desktop.

I have mine configured as close as I can to what the default layout seems to be from the screenshots I’ve seen online.

UNR makes good use of available screen real estate (my screenshots are running at 800×600) by putting each application in a “Tab.”  I installed a couple of extra apps, Deluge 1.0rc2 and Banshee 1.0, and sure enough, they automatically conformed to the layout.

UNR places it’s launchers and menus on the desktop, which is quickly accessible from the “Go Home” button in the upper-left corner (it looks like an Ubuntu logo).

I’m not crazy about the look and feel.  The desktop has a nice, new, polished look to it while the applications themselves use the standard Human theme.  Either are nice on their own, but they seem to clash when used together.  The interface was also a little slow, but that may be due to running it inside a virtual machine, as I’ve heard that the interface makes some use of OpenGL.

Overall, it’s a nice product and most tasks are accomplished easily.  This will make a great OS for the Eee PC or any other subnotebook.