I’ve been dragging my feet getting started on this. I have been toying with FreeBSD off and on for a bit on an older machine. It’s a K6-2/300 for those geeky enough to keep track. I congratulate FreeBSD for running fairly well on it despite the meagre hardware specs.

Mini-ITX seems to have a bit of a niche in Germany and Britain. Most anything you find about it comes from overseas. There is now a North American operation through Logic Supply. That is where I purchased my Motherboard from. My plan has evolved over time. I was originally looking at the MII series because it seemed decently well rounded. Then the SP came out with SATA support. I ended up going with the EN12000 since it’s the fastest fanless in the EPIA line. I’m a bit of a hippy and the low power consumption might end up with this being solar powered. That’s for a later stage of evolution.

Like almost any of my projects they take years and usually evolve quite a bit over time. I was planning on scavenging the parts out of the old K6. That doesn’t look like it’ll be an option. The case was made before those universal plate things that come with otherboards now. In fact the only onboard connector is the Keyboard. That is the old style keyboard. Everything else was done with expansion boards. Even the ISA slot was being used. It was an obscenely inefficient rats nest of cables and cards. About 95% of this mess has been made obsolete by the onboard connectors on the new EN12000. The RAM isn’t the right type either. So I was thinking with a clever bit of work with a grinder and a drill I could repurpose the case at least. That is still true but I looked at the power supply and noticed it was made with AT connections instead of ATX. I’d need at least a new power supply.

So I started dialing local PC shops that were still open. I got some decent prices on cases and some laughs at the expense of the Future Shop employees. At least I know that the big box store isn’t going to wrest control of that sector from the local specialty shops.

I chose a friendly local place and we looked at a few options and tested out the board with the basics hooked up to it. It started a small fire. It looked to be the result of mass production, a manufacturing defect. So I went home without buying the PSU and a little bit dissapointed.

I emailed the folks at Logic Supply and let them know what had happened. They responded quickly and I gave them a call to work out the details of the return. Unfortunately it’s a toll call, but that’s only a minor problem. They were fast and efficient, the call was answered immediately and I was only on hold for about 30 seconds. I think the call lasted less then 5 minutes. They emailed me the info for the return. It’s been very pleasant so far. I do have to pay for the shipping and such, that’s not a surprise I knew that before I purchased. They made that clear on the website, it’s still a pain but I was aware of it.

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Dec 28

So Since I last updated this, I got the board back from Logic Supply and sat on it for a while. I actually got it back in good time. Just over the last few days I bothered to give it another go. So right now it runs and boots into Puppy linux. I still have to get a SATA cable to install the hard drive. After that it should be ready to roll.

Major thanks to Sarnia Computer Center, they’ve been really helpful. I think that’s mostly due to the curiousity of what I’m actually doing.

This is the front of the case. You can see that my monitor is Aamazing. You also can see in the top right corner of the case the duct tape that holds the door on.

This is from the back. A friend told me it reminds her of Resident Evil. You can see the Orange power supply with its bright orange cables. I think the biohazard symbol is to warn people not to look directly at it.

This is the front without the flash. The flash washes out the LED’s. They actually are pretty bright, it’s hard to capture the full effect. If you look carefully you can see it’s failing to boot. That’s because I disconnected the CD Drive. I probably could have taken some pics with the puppy desktop.

This is from the back again. You can see that the fan in the biohazard symbol lights up blue and red. The PSU has a rainbow cyclic flashing thing going on. Pictures can’t really capture it.

This is probably the most important picture for geeks. You can see, if you peer deep into the cavernous hull, the motherboard. Other than the bright orange PSU it’s the only thing in there. You might even be able to see the power supplies windows. They don’t look very see through in these pictures. The motherboard is very small, the heatsink covers half the board. And aside from the side window fan this is essentially silent. The power supply fans are really quiet. I think that’s because it’s running two at a lower RPM.

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Jan 5 2007

Well I finally got off my ass and got the SATA cable. I also got a new CDROM drive. I got the hard drive hooked up, and was treated to a surprise. It wasn’t empty, I kinda expected that, it had XP Pro on it. Unfortunately it wouldn’t boot into it. I hooked up the new CD Drive, but it wouldn’t detect for some reason (I figured it out and felt dumb for it later). So I hooked up the old one, booted into puppy and looked at the xp drive. There wasn’t anything on the drive. Basically just Windows. No incriminating photos, no software, there was a user profile but it was empty except for the essentials. There also was a restore partition on it. Oh well, it was broken and wouldn’t boot, so I banished it. I put FreeBSD over it. There was no issues, the ethernet was fine. I actually had an embarassing moment with the ethernet as well. I just did a static configure and set it all up like that. Then tried to ping. Nothing. Checked the settings, All good. Checked the router settings, that interface didn’t show up. I finally had an epiphany, the thing wasn’t plugged in. I got used to having everything always plugged in. The CDROM tricked me for a while. I was getting mad and so I pulled it out and looked it over. A glance at the connectors reminded me that the jumpers were likely messed up. I changed it from slave to cable select and it worked like a dream.

So other than user error there was no difficulty. Right now I only have the base installed. I’m anticipating the 6.2 release to drop in a week or two so I don’t want to get to far ahead before I rebuild the world. I look forward to it this time. I did it on a 300mhz with 128Mb RAM and it took most of a day. Now I have 1.2Ghz and 512Mb RAM.

The Bios shows the temp sitting around 80F for the CPU and about 100F for the system when I disconnected the fans. I have the fans going again. I hooked the case fan up to a different connector, lower voltage and it’s not going like a jet engine anymore.