My Home Computing Utopia

OK, so we’ve moved house and I’ve found my study (computing area devoted to Ken) has been downsized to what I would call a ‘cubby-hole’ – Not Good !! Anyway, alongside trying to rationalize what I use on a day to day basis and moving the equipment around I’ve been thinking of what I really want.

To rationalize everything I currently have and get ‘what I really want‘ I envisage :
A small / low powered PC providing email, instant messaging, file sharing and running Subversion (source code control). This would enable me to run it 24/7 using a minimal amount of power, it would allow Sarah to do email and IM and allow me to get access to source code and files remotely. Then the second (large, more powerful) PC can simply be switched on when needed (DVD burning, importing from camcorder etc).
I noticed a review recently of a ASUS device which is basically a wireless router with built in web server print server, ftp server, it can share USB printer, webcams and has a 160GB drive with RAID 1 option built in. I expect this is based around one of these small Linux based boards that are so prevalent these days – I have another one in the form of a Linksys WRT54G wireless router (running DD-WRT custom software)….. These devices can do much of what I need, the missing parts are email, internet browsing and IM – not present as the devices have no graphics capability (all the interaction with it is done via the clients web browser to a built in web server in the device)… The ASUS device goes a little further in that it can host other USB devices on it’s ports and share those out also (webcams, printers etc), but still not quite far enough…

I guess I’m looking at putting a small form factor Mini ITX based system together that’ll do the email, IM and Subversion and using an external USB drive as the mail store for file sharing.

Of course, this doesn’t cover my HTPC utopia or my PDA utopia – more on those later.