It's alive

Well the toast-oven computer came about a lot faster than I figured.  Tracy worked all day yesterday getting the case prepared, by cutting a hole in the back for the motherboard connects, mounting the power supply on the back, and attaching the LEDs to the front cover.  The red H.D. light fit nicely in the old 'ON' light spot, and we drilled a new hole for the green power LED.  The rough edges on the back were sealed with weather striping, and the motherboard was mounted to the oven grate with a series of rubber feet attached to the bottom of the motherboard.

After everything was put together, we flipped on the power, and it came alive.  We moved it into the office so it would have a direct connection to the internet during install.  We installed a few times, but each time the install crashed with I/O errors.  Eventually we just assumed it was the CD drive, which is proably about 10 years old. The install got far enough to allow us to boot, and we did an update from there.  It was getting pretty hot inside the case (it's an oven, it's supposed to retain heat) so we put a northbridge fan over the southbridge (the northbridge already had a heat sink, so it would have been hard to install the fan on it).    That helped to get the heat moving out of the case.

We removed the CD drive and put everything in place, and rebooted again, but this time the HD wasn't recognized.  We tried another HD, and it wasn't recognized either.  Just to make sure it wasn't the IDE controllers or southbridge, we hooked up the CD to the IDE, and that worked.  It seemed like we had fried both hard drives, and now nothing worked.  I tested the hard drives with my external IDE-USB connection, and it wasn't recognized.  It was close to midnight, so we decided to wrap it up.

The next morning, I got up and was looking at the hard drives to see if there were any instructions on the label that we hadn't followed.  The jumper was set to master, so I figured that was all that was needed to get it recognized.  Looking at the label on the hard drive, I noticed that no jumper was the prefered setting for single drive configuration, so I tried it again hooking it up to my IDE/USB connector.  This time it worked.  So we wasted no time getting it back inside our little monster, and finally we got it to boot up.

The next problem was the wireless network dongle.  We tried using on we had from our samsung blue-ray player, but it wasn't recognized.  I did some research, and found that it had a Ralink 3572 chip, and there was a driver from Ralink, and it just had to be compiled and installed as a mod.  Unfortunately, the compile failed, as there was no kernel headers to compile against.  Apperently the update failed when downloading the kernel headers, and now it was running linux 2.6.32-23, but only had the headers for linux 2.6.32-22.  And without a network, we couldn't fix the kernel source very easily.  I tried tarring it up from pearl, and transfering it via a thumb drive, but it's still not working.  It might simply be easier to get a new wireless dongle then fight with a half updated system to get this driver compiled.

As promised, here's some pictures: