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Ubuntu has released Ubuntu Multimedia distro that is dedicated to multimedia htpc’s, altough it doesnt come with any special gui its fitted to htpc’s with codex and such.

check it out here

heres another great guide on setting an ubuntu box as a router/firewall/gateway to your small biz or just home.

“creating a firewall/(mail)gateway for a small network (say 10 to 15 users or so on a PIII 450MHz, 512 MB ram and two identical network interface cards, broadband connection, fully featured, for a bussines environment. Better specs of your hardware (notably the amount of ram) will improve the performance of your server significantly. The specs mentioned ar a bare minimum for not so demanding customers, yust to indicate that if you really want, it can be done indeed (need to do some tweaking afterwards though).

Expected audience: (beginning) sysop.”
check it hereÂ

Another great distro by ubuntu is ubuntu Mint that provides a more turnkey (including pre-installed browser plugins, codecs and such) in one suitted install.

“Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java, and other components. Linux Mint 2.0, code name “Barbara”, was released yesterday: “This release is based on Ubuntu 6.10 and uses the Ubuntu installer. The desktop is GNOME 2.16.1 and the kernel is 2.6.17. Barbara comes with the following plugins: Macromedia Flash 9 beta, Sun Java 1.5 Update 9, RealPlayer 10. Support for MP3, Windows and various codecs, encrypted DVDs is installed by default. Barbara comes with Amarok 1.4.4 instead of Rhythmbox. The default artwork is a blue version of the ‘Human’ theme.”Â

check it out hereÂ