Every geek needs a large power-hungry supercomputer, right? Wrong.

French company Linutop offers a tiny machine - the Linutop - no bigger than a mid-sized paperback novel. Weighing a mere 250 grams, this machine will make cleaning your desk a breeze. The Linutop is powered by the AMD Geode LX700, and consumes just 5 watts of power - a sure benefit to any taxed power grid. The Linutop has no moving parts and boasts 4 USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, audio in & out, and 250MB of RAM.

French mini-PC vendor Linutop announced a version of its Ubuntu 8.4-based Linux distribution on a USB key targeting Asus Eee PCs. The key (pictured) is based on its small-footprint Linutop 2.2 distro, which is designed for ultra-low-powered systems such as its own Linutop 2 mini-PC.

The Linutop is a small Linux PC. Of course, if you think the MacMini is small, then perhaps the words, incredibly miniscule are closer to the mark.
Running a customised version of xubuntu Linux, this little box could replace your desktop for most common tasks, including what you're doing right now.
And if this wasn't impressive enough in a box slightly larger than a Nintendo DS, the Linutop does it all drawing a maximum of 5 watts - That's less than an energy saver light bulb!
Read on for the full review..

"Linutop 2 has an internal flash memory to store the software and the operating system (External USB Key for Linutop 1)..."

Nettops are gaining popularity following the success of the popular Netbooks. Linutop is introducing their new Nettop the Linutop 3.

A shift from multi-core power-gobbling monsters toward whisper-quiet systems with single-digit power consumption is rippling through the desktop market. This trend plays right into the hands of a Paris-based company called Linutop, which offers a miniature Linux-based desktop system.

Linutop announced the third generation of its compact Linux-based PC. Larger and with twice the memory of previous models, the Linutop 3 has a 1GHz Via C7 CPU, gigabit Ethernet, dual SATA ports, and PCIe expansion, the company says.

Machines like Linutop can make a rather neat mini server which you can use to host virtually any application base on the LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). The problem is that turning Linutop (or any machine for that matter) into an application server involves setting up the required servers (e.g., Apache and MySQL), manually modifying configuration files, and tweaking application settings.

The Linutop is a pocket size desktop PC, the size of a paperback novel. It does not have an internal hard disk drive, but instead its open source operating system resides on a USB key.