Well, folks sorry for the delay, but we’re having some hardware problems.

Just because you get the system to come up and “Post” does not mean that everything is connected and operating properly.  And that is the case here.

When I started putting this system together, I used parts from previous systems, instead of purchasing all new components, and now it seems I’m paying the price in terms of delays.

First initial troubleshooting, when I went to put in the operating system disk, I uncovered the first problem.  The DVD drive drawer would not open and the drives disk access light was always on.  The drive open button did not work.  If you using newer IDE cables this will not happen. I wasn’t, and I got unlucky.  The newer IDE cables have a blocked off pin, so you can visualy see which way to plug in the cable.  The older ones do not.  I had a 50-50 chance of getting it right.  And of course, I put the cable in the wrong way.  Simple solution is to pull out the IDE plug, turn it around and reconnect it.  Problem solved and the DVD drive now works properly.

Next, I put the operating system disk in the drive, started loading, and I got an interupt error which halted the process.  It turns out the SATA disk drive is not recognized.  This may mean, I have a bad motherboard, disk drive, or computer chip.  In no particular order. So I am in the process of troubleshooting the problem or problems.

The ultimate solution is to purchase a new motherboard, chip, and disk drive and make sure I have all new components.

So I beg your patience. I may need to order components, which means shipping and delay.  When I get back to the stage where the operating system loads, because all the hardware works properly.  I will fill you in on how things worked out, and we’ll pick up loading the software.  In the meantime, we’ll blog on some other topics until we’re ready to go again.

Ok, let’s get back to getting our computer system built.  Now that we have installed our hardware components in the case, hooked all the cables up, and got the system to “post,” so we know that the hardware is working correctly, it’s time to load the operating system.

The operating system we’re going to load is Ubuntu 9.10.  It was just released last Friday.  Ubuntu is a version of Linux.  Linux is an open source operating system,  many people have taken Linux and changed it to suit their needs.  There are a lot of different versions of Linux, one of which is the Apple operating system.  The different versions of Linux are called “distros.”  We talked about this in another post.

I choose Ubuntu, because it is one of the most popular distros out there, they are committed to making an operating system that competes with Microsoft, and finally they have a strict update schedule of a new release every six months, which means they are committed to continuously improving their software.

Before we load Ubuntu we want our own CD of the operating system.  The operating system installs from the CD.  It currently takes 690 Mb of space.  There are two ways to obtain the Ubuntu CD.  You can ask Ubuntu for it, and they will send you a disk, or if you’re like me, and can’t wait, you can make your own disk.  Let’s walk through creating your own disk.

Go to the Ubuntu web site at http://www.ubuntu.com/.  Click on the Download block, which will take you to the download page.  We are going to follow the directions on this page.

Click on the Begin Download Desktop 9.10 (32-bit), select your location, and start your 690 Mb download.  It will take a while depending on your connection.  This downloads a compressed file with an .iso extension.  Do not load the Windows Installer version, which is made to install over top of a Windows installation.

After you download the .iso file, you’ll need a CD disk burning software that will burn an .iso file. An iso file is an archive of a disk image, which is what we want to end up with.  Windows Media will not do that.  I recommend downloading the open source .iso burner recommended on the Ubuntu site, called  InfraRecorder.  To get this in Step 2. of the Ubuntu site, click on “How to Burn a CD Image.“  Scan down the page until you come to the operating system your using to obtain the .iso image.  Click on  InfraRecorder to download and install it.  After InfraRecorder is installed go bak to this page and follow the directions for your operating system.

After the CD is complete, were just about ready to load the operating system.  To check the CD, put it in the DVD drive you used to obtain the iso image, and reboot your computer.  The CD is set up so you can boot the Ubuntu operating system from the CD.  If Ubuntu comes up on the computer, the CD is ok.  Do not click “Install Ubuntu” on the Ubuntu desktop.  We’ll do that on the computer you built.

If you’d like to look around the Ubuntu desktop before hand, feel free to look around.  We’ll get into the operating system itself later.  When your done, take the disk out of the DVD drive, and reboot your computer to get back to your other operating system.   You may also want to tour the Ubuntu Features here.

Before we begin our installation, let’s pause for one post, and talk about Open Source Software.  Open Source Software is software that is open and in the public domain.  Open Source refers to the source code which is also in the public domain, thus open.   In other words, it’s free.

There are a couple of different license types for Open Source Software, but basically, if it’s Open Source, you can go ahead and download it, and use it on your computer for free.  It’s free for private use and it’s free for commercial use.  There are no license fees, no one to notify when you download and use the software, and no license police out to see if you have paid for the current copy of the license.  Have at it and enjoy.

Now this begs several questions.  Why would anyone give software away that they’ve created?   Marketing software for sale takes quite a bit of revenue and effort.  As soon as you become successful, then big brother will come along with a competing product, and with big brothers marketing muscle, your out of business.

In fact, there is a business model for open source software and a way to make money for developers.  Usually a robust, free version is given away, and a pro version is sold with additional features.  Adobe pioneered this method.  Also commercial customers want support from developers, and are willing to pay for that support.

Isn’t free software shoddy, not up to commercial standards?  Your in for a shock, but a lot of Open Source Software is just as good and in some instance better than commercial versions.  Why? Because, some developers just like developing an application to see if they can do better than any other product on the market.  Sometimes it’s not just one developer, but several with a common mission.  The developers are in it for the love of building good software, and for the most part they do an excellent job.  They know if you don’t like it, your going to delete it and not use it.

What can I expect when downloading open source software?  You can expect high quality software, with very few bugs, good install programs, and with all the bells and whistles of the commercial equivalent software.  A lot of times this will run on all operating systems.  Some of this software was developed by major corporations, like Sun, who developed Open Office and gave it to the public as a way to diminish Microsoft Office.

What are the drawbacks from using Open Source Software?  Well. just like any commercial software you would buy, don’t expect Open Source Software to do things exactly like, and have the same exact look, as the leading commercial version.  The controls may be slightly different, or in a different place, or the menus are slightly different in wording or placement.  If your developing competing software you want to make it slightly different, and have more or better functionality.  Now having said all that you’ll find Open Office is very close to Microsoft Office in the way you interact with the software.

Free software has been around since 1983, that’s 26 years, a long time.  Some of the open source software has had a decade or more put into its development, so you can expect non-trivial, high quality software that will have the good functionality.

So with this intro.  What were going to be doing with this software installation is loading Open Source software.  Our goal is to have a computer system that will have the functionality of a Microsoft based system with out any of the cost.  Let’s see how close we can come.

For those who have been with these postings from the start, you’ll know I had a little beef with Microsoft about their licensing policy for OEM licenses, which I documented in another post.  Maybe it was just me, but I decided to rid myself of the dreaded Microsoft strangle hold on software.

I started assembling a new computer with one mission in mind.  To prove to myself and my audience that I could assemble a PC that would have the functionality found on a Windows system without paying for any Microsoft software or products.  The aim here is to not directly load or pay for any Microsoft products.  That doesn’t mean that a Microsoft product will not somehow be on my system, it will, but it will be a freebee and I will not have given Microsoft any direct revenue for the software.

This mission has led to the “Building a Computer” section of this blog, and that section has progressed to the point where all the hardware is running and we are ready to load software.

We have come to a crossroads.  If you just wanted to build your own computer, and load the latest Microsoft Operating System, like Windows 7, along with Microsoft Office, etc. more power to you.  We wish you well, and see you on your way.

If you are interested in loading a free operating system, like Ubuntu, then keep reading, that’s what this blog is all about.  Goodbye, Microsoft, Hello Open Soruce software.  Let’s get started.

It’s time to see how well you’ve done.  We’re going to test your hardware installation, before moving on to the software installation.  To do this we have to hook up your outer components, that is the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power supply.

Get out the monitor you want to use.  Preferably a monitor you have tested on another computer that you know works.  Attach the video connector to the back of the graphics card.  Plug in the monitor power cord.

Your mouse if its a PS2 connector attaches to the green colored plug and your keyboard attaches to the purple PS2 connector.  If they are USB connectors, just plug both of them into any available USB port.

First, turn on the monitor.  On your computer connect the power cord to the back of the power supply, make sure the switch is on “0″, which means “Off.”  Connect the power cord to your electrical outlet.

Here we go.  Switch the power switch on your power supply to “1,” or “On.”  You should see the power light on the motherboard.  All is well.  Turn the power off by using the front case on-off switch.  Hold it in until the system shuts down.  Push the front panel power switch again to turn the system back on.  Your front panel power light should come on as well as your system.

If all of the above works fine, you’ve tested you case hook ups, and your power supply.  Let the system run for awhile and an image with the motherboards name should appear on the monitor.  This is called “posting.”  If it doesn’t post initially, try it a couple of more times, before panicing.  Sometimes on a new board it takes a couple of cycles to get everything in sync.  You’ll see people complain on forums about not being able to get their system to “post.”   What there saying is they don’t get an image on their monitor.

Posting

If your system posts, has an image on the monitor, you’ll see an instruction to hit a key to enter “set up.”  Usually it’s either the “delete” key, F1 key, or the F8 key, depending on the manufacturer.  Go ahead and enter set up.  By the way, Congratulations! You did a great job putting your system together.

Set up is a system of menus that configures your bios settings, and where you tell your computer how you would like to configure the computer and let’s you set some settings.   You do not have to go into every menu choice, for now, all we want to do is make sure we boot from your DVD drive first and your hard drive second.   This lets you load your operating system from the DVD drive, which is the first thing we’ll do when we start the software installation.

In the set up menu, you can look around and make changes if you understand what the choices mean.  They should be explained in your motherboard Users Guide.  The way you change a setting is with the arrow keys on the keyboard, you pick the top menu and hit the return key on the keyboard.  This will open that menu, go to the choice you want to change, and hit a return to see your choices, you change with the arrow keys and the return key.  When you done hit F10 to exit and save your changes.

Use your arrow keys on your keyboard and move to the boot menu page.  This is where you change your boot configuration.   Look for a choice called “Boot Device Priority” or something like that.  Hit the return and you’ll see your devices.  Set the DVD to boot first then your hard drive that your going to put the operating system on.  Hit the F10 key.

Bios Setup with Boot Device Priority shown

If you don’t post, something is wrong, obviously.  No display means your monitor is not working or your graphics card is not working.  Plug your monitor into another computer to check it out.  No motherboard light can mean either you have a bad motherboard or power supply.  Check your power connector plugs.  You get the idea.

That’s it for this post, pun intended.  Congratulations again, on getting the computer to post,  great job.   Put the sides back on your computer case, and let’s get ready to load some software on this puppy.   I will pick the rest of the build up under a new category, software installation.  See you there.

The power supply seems like an easy install, but get ready for spaghetti.  Now that you have your drive data cables connected, your fans connected, and your case wires connected to your motherboard, your computer inside may seem like a jumble of wires, but you haven’t seen anything yet.  We’ve saved the power supply until the end because the amount of cabling is about to double.

When you consider that each DVD drive, your hard drive, maybe your graphics card,  and the motherboard requires power and that power has to arrive at the device needing power via a power cable, then all of a sudden you’ve got twice as many cables running all over the inside of the case.  But there is a method to the madness, so let’s get started.

Power Cables

Unwrap your power supply from its packaging, and take it out of the wrapping material.  If you didn’t get a modular power supply you’ll see a bunch of cables coming out the back of the power supply.

Modular Power Supply

If you got a modular power supply, you won’t see as many cables coming out the back, but you’ll still see some.  You’ll also see ports on the back for the modular power cables.  I like modular power supplies because it reduces the number of non-useful cables in your computer.  You only use the cables you need.   If you have a modular power supply, make sure the extra cables snap into the power supply ports with a click so it won’t come out inadvertently later when using the computer.

Let’s install the power supply in the case.  The power supply fits into its own notch in the case.  Fit the power supply into the case so the on-off switch comes out the back of the case, and the power supply fan is pointed toward the open air on the inside of the case.  Do not block the fan by having the fan pointed at the case side.  Also make sure none of your previouse wires are trapped by the power supply.

The power supply is held to the case with four Phillips screws attached from outside the case.  Make the screws tight, but not super tight.  The cables should come out the back of the power supply inside the case.

There should be at least three cables coming out the back.  One is a big wide 24-pin ATX connector that is the main power to your motherboard.  You should easily find where that goes on the motherboard.  It has a latch on the side that matches with a hook on the plug so you put the plug in the correct direction.

There should be at least one 8-pin ATX 12v and one 6-pin PCI express coming out the back of the power supply.  One of these will go into the second power connector on your motherboard.  This may be a 8, 6, or 4-pin socket, and usually the 8-pin power plug can be broken in half to make two fours.  Check your motherboard, or your motherboard diagram to find this connector.

Your graphics card may take a 6-pin power cable.  Some graphics need additional power and some don’t.  Look for a power connector plug on the graphics card, if you don’t see one, the motherboard will power the card.

Molex Connector

Each drive needs power.  The IDE drives use a 4-pin Molex connector.  The Molex connector is rounded on two edges to match the connector which is also rounded on two corners, so you can’t put it in the wrong direction.

SATA Power Connector

The last power connectors you will need is the SATA power connector.  This is a 15-pin slim connector with an L-shaped appendage on the end, like the data cable had, so you can’t hook it up the wrong way.  Make sure they’re pushed in tight to the disk drive.  You’ll need one power connector per drive, one power cable usually has two connectors.

Congratulations!  You’ve installed all your hardware inside your case.  Before we put the covers on the case we’ll will want to test things out, which we’ll write about next.

This one should be relatively easy.  There are two types of data cables for connection to storage devices, such as: solid state drives, hard drives, and DVD drives.

The first is the old version which is called IDE or EIDE, or ATA.  This is a 16 bit wide bus that transfers data from anywhere between 16 Mb per second to 133 Mb per second depending on which version your using.  Each IDE connector on the motherboard can hook to two IDE storage devices, a master and a slave.  Remember when we installed the DVD drives, we put a jumper wire over two of six pins to designate master or slave drive.  IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics, just a little tidbit.

IDE cable

IDE cables look like flat ribbons 2″ wide with three connectors attached to the ribbon.  The cable is normally 18″ long, but you can get round cables that go up to 36″.  Round cables are nice, because they do not get in the way of other cables in the case, are more flexible, and do not redirect or impede air flow.

The three connectors on the IDE cable are spaced two close together and one at the othe end of the ribbon.  The stand-alone connector at the end goes to your motherboard.  The other two cables go to the master and slave drive.  There are 40 holes in the connector consisting of 2 rows of 20 holes.  One of the holes in the middle is blocked to let you know which way to insert the cable into the socket.  So do it.  Put the cable in the motherboard and the other end in your DVD drive.  If you do not have a 2 rows of 20 pins to put the cable into, then you probably have a SATA drive.  Read on.

SATA data cable

Starting in 2007 a new horse rode into town for both power and data cables, called serial ATA, or SATA.  This is gradually replacing all the IDE ribbon cables, as you can get SATA DVD drives now.  SATA cables transfer data anywhere from 1.3 Gb per second (first generation) to 3.0 Gb per second (second generation) to 6.0 Gb per second (thrid generation), with the most common SATA hard disk drives transferring at 3.0 GB per second, at present.  Almost 22 times faster than an IDE cable, you can see why they are replacing the old technology.

SATA cables are much smaller than the IDE cable, although they are a little stiff.  The data connectors have only 7 pins with an L like notch on one end, so the connector will only go into the interface one way.  There is a slightly different SATA power connector which will talk about when we get to power cables.

SATA connector showing notch

Let’s hook up the data cables.  There should be one SATA cable per drive to one socket in the motherboard.  Go back to your motherboard diagram and look for your SATA connectors.  They should be labeled SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, etc.  Your main drive, the one with the operating system should be connected to SATA1 and so on.  Go for it.

You should now have the data cables to all your drives attached to your motherboard.  Now that wasn’t so bad.  Now all we have to do is get power to the system, something we haven’t written about yet and the topic of our next post.

For me, the hardest thing to do in building a computer is hooking up the computer case wiring.  You are handling very small plugs and pins.  Most of the time, you can’t get to the plugs, because other wires and boards are in your way.

You might be asking why are you hooking up wires when you don’t even have the power supply in the case yet.  Well, there’s a method to my madness.   These wires are difficult to get in place, I like to put them in before any other wires get in the way to make the job a lot easier.  So we’ll start with the computer case wiring.

What are all those wires attached to the case?  Most of you have seen the front lights on the computer when the disk drive is accessed.  You’ve turned the front power switch on and off, and you’ve hit the reset button when your software hangs up.  Well all that is controlled by the motherboard, the lights and switches on the front of the case are hooked to the motherboard through these wires.  If you have any USB or Firewire ports on the front of the case they’ll have to be hooked up also.

Let’s get started.  Get out your motherboard user’s guide that came with your motherboard.  Look for the diagram of the motherboard.  What your looking for is where the ports are on the motherboard.  Keep this page open as we proceed so you will know where plugs and cables are connected to the motherboard.  Most User’s Guides also show the connector pins in a diagrams so you know which pins are for what.

Look for a block of pins usually called “panel,” or “front panel connector.”  The power on/off switch plug and the reset swith on/off plug usually are two-pin plugs.  They should slide over their respective pins which should be labeled “PWRSW” and “RESET.”  You’ll find a four pin plug which is your system warning speaker for beeps and warning signals when something is wrong, slide that over the four “SPKR” pins.

Computer Case Wires

We have two lights on the front panel.  One lets you know there is power to the system, the power on light, and the other is when the disk drive is accessed.  Each are two pin plugs.  The system power is usually labeled, “PLED,” and the disk drive light is usually called, “IDE_LED.”  After you slide all these small pins over the posts on the motherboard, the hardest wiring is taken care of.

Most of the current cases, have a USB port on the front panel.  These USB port(s) are different from the USB ports in the back of the computer.  The ones on the back are already hooked up directly to the motherboard.  So we’re hooking up the front USB ports.  Look for a connector on the motherboard labeled “USB58″ or “USB76″ or just plain, “USB.”  The plug from the front panel should be labeled, “USB.”  This is a 10-pin plug with one pin plugged up so there is only one way to install this on the motherboard.

The next cable is the audio cable, usually labeled “HD AUDIO,” or “AUDIO.”   There may be another plug on this wire labeled, “AC97.”  Ignore this, and use the “HD Audio” plug if you have digital audio on your motherboard.  If you  don’t the motherboard diagram will give you the AC97 port.  The HD Audio plug is a 10-pin plug with a different pin blocked than the USB plug had.  On the motherboard diagram is usually called “Front Panel Audio connector.”  This connector usually just looks like 9 pins sticking up in the air.

Audio Cable

The last front panel cable you may or may not have.  This is for your 1394 “Firewire” port, and this depends if you have a Firewire port on the front of the case or not.  The plug is usually labeled “1394″ and the motherboard diagram is usually called an “IEEE 1394a connector, or simply, “Firewire header.”

That should be it for the computer case front panel cabling, except there’s still a wire, or maybe two, floating in the case.  These are for the case fans.  Most motherboard have a couple of connectors for fans called “Fan header,” or “Pwr Fan2″, “Pwr Fan2,” etc.  These are three-pin connectors.  Hook up your case fans.

You should now have all the loose wires in your case hooked up to the motherboard, congratulations.