Intel will demonstrate the Amahi Home Digital Assistant running on its Atom N270 and N945GSE chip set in a prototype system at Computex. The software runs on any x86 CPU, is available free and is based on the Fedora 9 version of Linux.

Both Microsoft and Google have released software for integrated home servers. Amahi claims its software will link to a greater diversity of systems including Linux, Windows and Mac devices.

"The proliferation of home devices is just starting so you will need this cross platform capability," said George Wluka, chief executive of Amahi.

The Amahi software handles typical home server jobs such as file and print sharing as well as managing any flavor of Wi-Fi router and providing a virtual private network. In addition, its online gallery includes apps that can be installed by a single click for media sharing or creating a photo gallery.

The prototype system at Computex is the first step toward getting OEMs to adopt the free, open source code for new hardware products. "We have a burgeoning community of people who have installed the software and are running it on their own hardware, but no shipping systems yet," said Wluka.

Amahi's online app store will be free for the first year but cost end users an estimated $20 a year afterwards. The company hopes to add other paid-for services such as data backup.

The startup will share part of those fees with OEMs. Amahi charges OEMs "a small fee" to certify its software running on OEM systems.

Founder Carlos Puchol started work on the Amahi software about two years ago as a home server for his personal use when he was a chip architect at another startup, Montalvo Systems. He used the code to organize family pictures and other media, and one day created a wiki so his wife could use it as well.

"That's was kind of the spark, and I thought there could be something to this," Puchol said in an interview in the summer of 2008.

After Montalvo was sold, Puchol decided to see if he could turn his hobby into a business. "There's a rising number of IP devices in the home and people have difficulty networking them because they have no IT support," he said.

Despite a background as a chip designer at Nvidia and Transmeta, he targeted what he saw as the lowest cost way to create a company.

"A hardware solution is hard to bootstrap and having not done a startup on my own before I thought I would not be able to get funding," he said. "So I decided to leverage open source and try to develop a community."