Intro

Lack of desktop computer at home and curiosity to build my own Mini-ITX computer gave me enough power to start up yet another long-term project :-).

List of Parts

Everything has been ordered through internet from various companies. Mini-ITX, memory and 200GB hard drive are from Paradigm PCs (Wellington; www.pp.co.nz). PSU is from TradePC (Christchurch; www.tradepc.co.nz) and Logitech cordless keyboard & mouse are from TasTech Computers (Christchurch; www.tastech.co.nz)

Still "missing" parts are one silent fan for PSU; two Hard Drive Heatpipe Coolers ZM-2HC2 from QuietPC (Christchurch; www.quietpc.com/nz); Perspex box from FAB Plastics (Christchurch; www.fabplastics.co.nz); LCD monitor.

Rest of needed parts for example power switch button etc are from my local geek store Dick Smith Electronics (dse.co.nz).

Current list of parts:

Diary

2004-11-10

Decision made :-). Motherboard, RAM and hard disk drive ordered. Update: Keyboard with mouse ordered, too.

2004-11-16

Finally! Yesterday I received 200G hard drive and today RAM, motherboard and keyboard with mouse came. It's like having christmas ;-). PSU should be here tomorrow.

2004-11-17

I went to pick up PSU. Guy from TradePC is originally from Romania. Nice to meet someone from same part of world.

Should start working on gentoo because everyhing I need is here.

2004-11-19

o I've been to FAB Plastics to ask about Perspex/Acryl or whatever they call it. They have nice range and different colours to choose from. However price is 120NZD per square meter. Cutting it included, GST excluded. :-(. Kara is not going to be happy when I tell her about spending more money for computer...

o QCAD (www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html) is what I was looking for! Emerging it took me a while but this is what I'd like to use to draw the box for the computer.

o I already have one gentoo installation on 80GB hard disk drive, but it's compiled for Pentium 3, with CFLAGS not compatible for Mini-ITX.

I put this hard disk to unused pieced of hardware in the office and will try to recompile it with emerge world. Hopefully it'll run Mini-ITX. Boot up with Knoppix,

su - mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 chroot /mnt/hda1 /bin/bash

and changing configuration to:

CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=i586 -m3dnow -mmmx -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CXXFLAGS="-march=i586 -m3dnow -mmmx -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

And run

emerge sync; emerge portage; emerge -uv world

2004-11-20

Just visited office on saturday and found out that emerge error occured because of some incopatibilities between XFree and Xogr header file. So i did what emerge said to do and moved header file from one place to another and rerun emerge world once again. Hopefully I'll find it compiled on monday.

2004-11-22

Emerged! etc-update did update to more than hundred config fiel sin /etc. Nice. I like emerge world :-). However still don't know if it'll work when I put hard drive to Mini-ITX.

2004-11-24

Laziness! Laziness!!! Had no time to do anything last couple of days. Just started page/article (this page) for the desktop computer and start writing diary because somehow I still remember important dates and things what I've done for this project. It's going to be really long term project. Well hopefully it won't be that long [this is what I usually say and it never happens to be short ;-)].

Alright, time to look inside of PSU :o). It looks like there is couple of milimiters to save when I take it out of original box and recreate fan vs PSU position. Also I shall need to make button cables longer and think (in QCAD) what'd be the best solution/position of all PSU parts to motherboard.

I start to play with QCAD. After some time I spent with it I found that instead of painting circles and rectangles it'd be better to download some documentation and maybe examples to produce something real :o).

2004-11-25

First attempt to put all available parts together on table with help some books and cd cover to create feeling of not having motherboard directly on the table. Word table means bike box at the top of small table ;o). Well I should be more serious, but you know...

I found I don't have power button! So attempt was good just for taking couple of pictures. That reminds me that I should download pictures from camera and put some of them here to Photo Galerry.

2004-11-27

I went to DSE and bought power button, plug to motherboard and cabels and forgot to buy soldering iron. Oh dear!

2004-11-28

It is not directly related to Mini-ITX project but quite important and unexpectedly quite short term I builded work table. So no longer bike-box-table but real one :o).

2004-11-30

Nooooooo. I forgot to recompile kernel!!! I have to get cdrom drive, boot from Knoppix and recompile tomorrow. However I have everything set up and I've seen it running :o).

2004-12-01

OK, I have cdrom drive (thanks Jim!) and freshly burnt cd with Knoppix 3.6.0 (thanks Dave!) and I am ready to try it. I booted it up and it looks alright :o). Running quiet (it's fanless so it's quite obvious pothead ;o) ) and suprisingly PSU is quite too! So this pageis true about it ;o)!!!

However hard drive sucks! It's quite noisy! So I saved money to buy recommended PSU (it's only one <200W PSU on market here in NZ!!! There are no Morex PSU here for example!!! What an impertinence!!!), but I still need two Zalman's Hard Drive Heatpipe Coolers ZM-2HC2 from QuietPC.

Nice thing is that everywhere in specification you have that it's 6 channel audio but there is also in specification that you have line-in, line-out and mic-in and nothing else. 6 channel audio cards anyway must have output for front and rear speakers and as well output for subwoofer. But as I read User's manual it starts to be clear. Line-in means for 6 channel cards rear speakers (left/right), line-out means front speakers (left/right) and microfone is subwoofer.

2004-12-02

I've tried to boot with Knoppix and enter to chroot to get to recompiled gentoo. "Illegal instruction" was an answer :-(. I tried to make some experiments to get into chroot, but it's pretty obvious now I am proper $#^%*. Emerging just world without using switch to empty tree was not a good idea at all. Of course, result is that some packeges are not recompiled and they're still optimized for Pentium 3 (coppermine) what cause that "Illegal intruction" error message. It seems like I shall start from the begining. Neved mind. It's long-term project, isn't it? ;o).

2004-12-04

It's all about karma and unpredictable coincidences that while on saturday shopping I stopped at the kiosk which was recommended by Jim regarding Linux magazines I found October's issue of Linux Format magazine packed along with 3 CDs containing 2004.2 version of Gentoo Linux. So I am sure now I am able to start from scratch to build fresh Gentoo Linux for mini-itx.

First of all I need to do backup of my laptop. All partitions are almost full and I haven't run xfs_fsr for a quite long time. Data must be in real mess on the hard drive.

Runing netcat and dd or xfsdump I moved everything to new 200GB hard drive disk.

Storage side: nc -l -p 1337 > hdaX.iso for dd, or nc -l -p 1337 > hdaX.dump for xfsdump

Laptop side: dd if=/dev/hdaX | nc 192.168.2.23 1337 or xfsdump - / | nc 192.168.2.23 1337

After backup I started with Gentoo LiveCD to bootstrap new linux installation and left it as it was until next day.

2004-12-05

I found mini-itx bootstraped in the morning. I switch it off and back on. I got some strange error from grub. Switch it off again, give it time to relax and switch it on. Alright. I got Gentoo LiveCD booted and runing.

So it's time for emerge system right now. But before I'd like to enable dma od hard drive:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

and maybe I should try also:

hdparm -d 1 -A 1 -m 16 -u 1 -a 64 /dev/hda

And one more thing. Distcc. Distcc is a program for distribute compiling tasks across a network and I wanted my laptop to participate on building of my new Gentoo on mini-itx.

I backed up all important parts of previous installation (before doing mkfs.xfs -f -l size=32m -L root /dev/hda1) s for example /etc, /usr/portage and /root directories and after that I recreated xfs file system on hda1 partition, emerge and setup distcc and ran emerge system. Distcc is sweet!

If someone'd be wondering why I don't make any notes (details) about installation itself it's because Gentoo Installation Handbook is too perfect to rewriting it.

At the end of the rainy day I finished system and ran into kernel configuration and setup.

2004-12-13

To be honest I read what I've written for this diary in last couple entries and it's real mess and chaos. As usually.

Next sentences are short recapitulation of what happend with this project in last couple of days. So, I managed to configure and

Photo Galerry

Not sorted images yet

Here's couple of first images from building up my first mini-itx project.