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The Computer in a Cardboard Box

The computer in a cardboard box. Not exactly a unique idea, but an interesting side project.

One day the PSU on my server died. After many years of use under a variety of owners. Fortunately, the motherboard nor many of the other parts were fried when this happened. Having some spare time on my hands – some might say too much – I decided to bring the idea of a computer in a cardboard box into being.

I had a spare PSU (aka power supply unit; aka transformer), but lacked an appropriate case. Rather than buying one, I cut up a cardboard box.

On board is a Slot 1 PIII 500Mhz CPU, 2 x 128MB of PC100 SDRAM, AGP 2x Ati Rage Pro card (has about 4MB of SDRAM), Yamaha sound card, and a 3COM NIC. The motherboard (Asus P2-99) sits on top of a Western Digital 4GB harddrive and a dysfunctional LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW. The optical drive fails to read DVDs. Also, the drive is only recognized when its jumpers are set to CS (cable select).

I reused the power and reset switches from the old case for powering up this computer in a cardboard box.

I installed Windows on it first, but gave up on the bloated OS. Switched to Debian stable.

It’s now an NFS client for my temporary server, does X11 over SSH using sdm (aka Secure Display Manager), runs MPlayer, xine, transcode and rtorrent.