The Qube2 from Cobalt will remind you of the crystal cube that belonged to Mandrake’s father, Theron. Only this one is plastic-blue instead of glass crystal. Qube2 is a full-fledged Linux server that can connect to your network and provide mail and Web services. And no, there’s no monitor to spoil the looks. The monitor is a single line LCD panel on the back of the system.

Once you connect it to your network and put it on, the system will automatically configure itself into your network (if you have DHCP available) and assign itself an IP address, or allow you to specify an address using the LCD panel at the back of the Qube.

The Qube2 is currently based on a MIPS CPU, but as we were going to press, information came that future versions will use Intel CPUs.

Software configuration is minimal and you can have mail and Web hosting up in a jiffy. All configurations are done using a browser from a machine on the LAN—very colorful, and quite easy to setup.

After a bit of fiddling around, we were able to telnet into the system to snoop around, where we got the first shock—apparently, changing any software component on the system (like adding a new kernel) voids your warranty. Given the rate of release of new software in the Linux universe, this is definitely not acceptable.

The unit shipped to us used Linux kernel 2.0.3x instead of the stable kernel 2.2 that’s been out since March 1999. The machine had probably come from an older lot. Software updates can be downloaded from the cobalt Website, but no update to Kenel 2.2 is available.

Moving further, there are lots of potential (and by now, well documented too) security holes due to non-updated sendmail, kernel, and other components. Add to the list of oldies Samba, and you have a fairly ancient system in your hands. Security tools like ssh are missing, and trying to compile it on the system from source code failed probably because of missing libraries and/or header files, pointing to bigger problems. If the system crashes for some reason, you will be hard pressed to bring it back to its original state. A system re-install CD would have taken care of this, but is not supplied. With no CD-ROM drive in the unit, it would seem pointless anyway.

The Qube2 comes with a power supply without earthing—we had several shocks and it definitely wasn’t good for the system either. The set up program does not always seem to remember its settings. We had to repeat the process several times before it would "take".

Once set up, the Qube2 offers a variety of very useful services, including Fileprint services (via Samba, which basically emulates a Windows NT server), Web services (including virtual domains), e-mail and ftp services, and discussion groups. The Qube2 can connect to a modem and can then dial out to an ISP, acting as an Internet gateway for the LAN, but the dial-out process is non-intuitive and totally buried in the menus.