XPC

It shouldn't be necessary to write an installation guide for a Shuttle XPC since they are made to support Linux kernels. I got a SN68PTG5 (Glamor Series) model, which comes with an AMD processor and an NVidia card (GeForce 7050 PV / NVIDIA nForce 630a which has HDMI/DVI output), a SATA disk drive and plenty of memory. I'm writing this down here anyway to inform anyone who might be interested in buying it, that it works fine with Linux. I installed Slackware Linux 12.1 and a recompiled version of the default 2.6.24.5 kernel on it. I used the proprietary NVidia drivers, version 173.14.12.

At first I gave KDE 4.1 (Slackware packages by Robby Workman) a go. It looked really pretty, had some interesting new functionality, but I decided to skip it for now because a number of my favourite packages of KDE programs weren't available for KDE 4 yet. There were also a number of strange bugs, such as empty message dialogues (blame may lie with one of the following: the Slackware packages, the NVidia drivers or this KDE 4 release). I had hoped to use the new 3D effect enriched KDE 4 desktop, which worked for the most part. But as is known, some of the NVidia cards don't work well with KDE 4 at the moment. Other XPC models which contain Intel graphics cards probably function properly, since their drivers are released licensed as open source. The only thing I noticed was some occasional flickering of certain bars (those of minimised windows in the taskbar or WM buttons on the top-right corner of windows), but this was another factor which made me go with an alternative for now.

My alternative was the default KDE 3.5.9 release which comes with Slackware 12.1, enhanced with Compiz Fusion, which at the moment still outdoes KDE 4's 3D effects greatly. View a short demo below (flickering is only present in the recording).