Little monster box

This is my first attempt to build something with a mini-itx board. 
What parts did I have for that?

a) Bought from Marktplaats a Commell LV-671 motherboard:  specs: - mini-itx, Pentium/Celeron  600M with just about everything onboard: video, sound,  network, mini-pci slot, CF IDE slot, PCMCIA/cardbus slot, PCI, etc. see Specs  here. Great advantage for real mini-designers: it works on either a 12V, or 19-20V laptop power supply. I now have two of these boards: Both the very-low-power with soldered-on Celeron 600M, and, from Ebay. one with a Pentium 4 Centrino: 1.5Ghz, and 2MB cache, which means it is as fast as a 2.4Ghz P4 due to the massive cache, but a lot less power hungry, and hence, due to a smaller fan, a lot more silent.

b) From Ebay: a mini-pci wlan card, and 512MB  PC2100 memory
c) 8GB USB-stick directly from a shop.
d) from junk-boxes: 1) one transparent case originally from a broken external firewire CD writer, 2)  two transparent speaker sets from a broken e-Mac, 3) 4-pins connector from a broken P-4 power supply, soldered to .
e) one 19V 3,6A HP laptop charger found on the street in a garbage box; YES!

Built it all together to get my '" Li'l  Monster'" box: Viz:



The transparent plastic Mac speakers match perfectly with the ditto case. I still need to hide the two USB slots below the left speaker - too late I realised the USB connector did not fit there, so it was moved upwards a bit. I need a nice sticker over it, preferably a 'Centrino inside' or so.
Size: Only 23cm wide, 19cm deep and 6 cm high (ex speakers).Or, in ancient human sizes: 9" by 7.5" by 2.5" .
Some more pics:


On this size the power switch (with hot-melt glue) and the Wlan/WIFI  antenna from the internal mini-pci (laptop) wifi card are connected.
Back side view:



Here all the (other) connectors are visible. And yes, the Dremel is your friend here, I needed to get all the holes in. It is not perfect, but good enough for my first attempt at Mini-itx-ing. As the board has  2x2W (or so) audio power on-board, it drives the speakers directly. As I sometimes want to connect hi-fi speakers, I connect them with a plug from the back, so I can disconnect them easily and plug in the hi-fi set.
In the above picture the PCMCIA slot also contains a 5GB Toshiba hard disk. But as I want a totally silent system, that is not usually in there.

And below, the view open from the right side:

 
Visible: Passive heat sink on the Celeron 600M, and  red/yellow/black wires from the coaxial power plug soldered to the ATX 4-pin connector. The original 4-pin over-sized Mini-Din external power connector is hard to find, but I can connect the 19V laptop supply this way without any problems to the '12V'  internal connector, as it is hard-wired. to the 12V/19V switching. I use double wiring as they (may) need to supply 3 Amps, especially as I may decide to replace the current low-power board with the 1,5Ghz Centrino board. (undecided yet...)
Note that the board needs to be higher than usual mini-itx boards: It needs extra clearance for the PCMCIA and CF slots on the bottom. So I have it raised on 6 double copper connectors I had laying around.

As mass storage an 8GB USB-stick suffices. And even that contains four operating systems for all different purposes, booted by choice from a syslinux command prompt: :
- DamnSmallLinux for very fast and small linux working - see http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
- Ubuntu 8.40 Hardy Heron - see http://www.ubuntu.com/ - designed as a most user friendly Linux OS. It is, however, not my favourite, that is:
- Knoppix 6.1 - see http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html  . My luck, just as I finished the li'l monster, I received in my favourite subscription C'T magazine the latest LinuxTag Knoppix 6.1. DVD distribution. This is a very fast, up-to-date live Linux distribution, and it has built-in support for copying itself to a USB stick of 4GB or larger. I use this most of the time.
- And last but not least, Freedos 1.0, see http://www.freedos.org/  The 'Balder' distribution comes with the Knoppix DVD, and I have copied some more apps to the USB stick.
Even now I still have over 3 GB left on the USB stick.

Current usage:  Browsing, plus Internet Radio and MP-3 playing. I may go to Open Office usage later on. Depends on the speed. 
Small, but fast box. Totally silent (if not using internet radio ;-) .

Expected expansion: Small 4-line LCD screen connected  to lpt to show what is playing.