That’s what it took to get the parts up and running (I eventually spent more time being careful with the wiring process in order to maximize ventilation). There’s really no other way to describe the joy of putting a computer together other than through pictures.
The parts came in two boxes. The left one was shipped from Tennessee and the one on the right was shipped from California. I’ve also got my computer kit on the table as well. Don’t mind the rust.
The box for the case.
Packing peanuts! Somehow I managed to keep most of them in the box. The hard drive is there on top.
The hard drive, the motherboard, and the RAM.
The motherboard and some extra parts that it came with.
The case.
The bottom circuit board is the power adapter and the top one is for the front panel ports.
Another view.
A few parts that came with the case.
This part grabber is great for both screws that have been lost inside of a case (this happened several times to me) and for starting screws that are located in hard-to-reach spots.
The motherboard after it has been mounted in the case. I accidentally forgot to put the back plate in, so I had to remove the motherboard and install it again.
I quickly connected everything up to make sure that the parts were working. Later on, I improved the quality of my wiring.
I moved the computer to another room with an extra monitor. Here is the computer, hooked up to all the components except a CD-ROM drive.
There was only one large molex power connector, which needed to go to the hard drive. So, instead of buying a converter, I hooked up a CD-ROM drive by using the power from another box. Yes, the computers in the background were the ones that I used for my cluster. I only needed the CD-ROM drive to install Linux. I may buy a DVD drive later on, but it will have to be a slim drive in order to fit into the case.
Success! (I know that the case needs to be cleaned a bit.)
I had a few issues. First of all, the Arch Linux installation CD decided that it didn’t want to play nice with my computer, so I decided to install Slackware instead. While compiling PHP, I noticed that the computer started to heat up like crazy. Then, I realized that the case fan was blocked. After fixing that problem (everything in case just fits), the computer cooled down again.
Next, I’m going to reconfigure the kernel and remove all the unnecessary items in order to reduce the load time. I’m also thinking of using Fluxbox instead of XFCE because it loads extremely quickly. My goal is to get the total load time down to around 30 seconds. There’s so much to do still.
0 Responses to “15 Minutes, 0 Instructions”