PERSONAL computers with Linux pre-installed have been springing up all over the place in recent months. Now Shuttle, the Taiwanese company famous for making small but perfectly formed PCs, have gotten in on the act. I’ve been spending some time in the company of their LinuXPC SD3002Q, which is sold with openSUSE 10.3 Linux pre-installed.

The LinuXPC was hard-wired to my Netgear broadband modem/router – there is no Wi-Fi in the LinuXPC although, with six USB ports, it’s easy to add an adaptor if you need it. Upon first switching on the LinuXPC, you’re asked to complete a few simple administration tasks – set your root and user details, locale etc – before the default openSUSE 10.3 desktop loads. Take a look at the screenshot of the default desktop and, apart from being an unsettling shade of green, it’s a pretty standard KDE 3.5.7 desktop environment – solid, functional and professional.

KDE 4 is available in the openSUSE repositories, but I’ll come back to that later. By default the LinuXPC comes with an 8GB root partition and the rest of that 250GB drive is devoted to /home.

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