Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems.

Control4 has added to its line of Linux-based, ZigBee-compatible home automation/media networking products with a new controller. The Control4 Home Controller HC-500 interfaces with home theater appliances, multi-room music access, lighting, thermostats, and security systems, and comes with a Linux software development kit (SDK).

Nokia announced a home automation system based on the open source OpenWrt Linux distribution. Due in late 2009, the Z-wave wireless radio-equipped Nokia Home Control Center will let users remotely control security, automation, and energy management applications via their mobile phones, says Nokia.

Minsk, Belarus-based product development firm Promwad has announced a design win for a Linux-based home-automation touchscreen panel. Promwad says it designed the "smart home multimedia control panel" in eight months, for a Swiss automation start-up called Incyma, using a Cirrus Logic EP9307 processor and Poky Linux.

A company called Fiire is shipping a home automation, media control, and security system based on the open source LinuxMCE distro. Built around a dual-core AMD Athlon X2-based box called the Fiire Engine, the Fiire system also includes FiireStation thin clients and a Z-Wave-based FiireChief controller.

The software, which includes a music server, runs on a growing number of Control4 controller devices, which are connected to Control4-manufactured wireless touchscreens, "speaker-points" and other devices. It has now been upgraded to version 2.0 (see farther below).

The Fifthplay FG4000 Gateway and Home Monitor builds on Wind River Linux to offer a customizable platform for developing home automation applications.

Most home computer users think of servers as the complex machines that form the backbone of corporate computer networks. But the functional definition of a server is far more flexible than that. Essentially, any computer that “serves” data to other machines on a network is a server. And as American households become populated with multiple PCs, the idea of a central hub that can be used for backup, storage and even remote access becomes reasonable, even essential.

Yes, I did my part, I took part in the 60 minutes for the Earth Hour event. It was easy, I stayed at home, kept all the lights, computers... We seldom waste money in large chunks, the same holds true with energy. The energy consumed by my desktop computer may not amount to much in the overall scheme of things, but the combination of all of our desktop computers do.