The main concept the computer industry has tried to push on the public over the last few years is of the connected home, where all our PCs, TVs and other devices can talk to each other and share music, pictures and other documents.

Sadly, it hasn't been borne out, largely because the industry can't agree on how exactly it should all fit together. That, and the fact that in order to watch downloaded films on a TV, for instance, it's necessary to have a computer on all the time.

Which is where the Bubba home server comes in – it connects to a home network and stays on all the time, networking printers, streaming media, downloading files and organising emails. It can even act as a web server.

The Bubba is built around a 160MHz processor, which is only one tenth as fast as a notebook computer's chip, but it uses a special version of the Linux operating system rather than Windows, which means it's more than up to the task.

Despite Linux having a fearsome reputation as being hard to set up and use, setting up the Bubba was simple, as long as your router uses DHCP (this is switched on by default for most routers). The manual must be downloaded from the website, which is annoying: as it is well written and helpful, it would have been nice to have had a paper copy.

The server works by setting up Users – each has a private, password-protected area on the server, which can be accessed using Windows on your own computer. It can use the DAAP method of sharing music, as used by iTunes, as well as UPNP, meaning most network media streaming devices can stream music right off the Bubba.

As well as sharing music and video over a home network, the Bubba can also be set up to download files on its own – either over the web, for podcasts, and so on, or over Bittorrent.

Incoming email is collected into one place – each user can set up several accounts, which the server automatically downloads. They can then be accessed directly from the Bubba server, over the web or from a program such as Outlook Express. As well as being a convenient way of checking multiple accounts at once, it also provides an excellent and automated backup of your entire email box.

A single USB socket on the back of the Bubba is for connecting a printer, which is then available to all the computers on the network. Each computer still needs the correct drivers but it's another way to avoid leaving another computer on all the time.

While a home server might sound like a big step, it makes sense for any house with more than a couple of people, who want to share files, it's a great idea.

Vista compatible: n/a