Introduction

The Apple G4 Cube had many similarities with projects on these pages. Plexiglas-stylee construction, miniscule case design, external power supplies, fanless operation - all too familiar. Suspiciously so. So suspicious in fact, that we think Jonathan Ives (a well known regular celebrity reader of this site) used his uber-design skills to create an egg-shaped time portal to double back a couple of years and invented it. Andy Woo (not his real name, his real name is Wookie) has installed an EPIA 800 into a salvaged G4 Cube case, and it's ready-made and fits a treat - none of this build a case from *insert ever more ridiculous material here* mallarkey. How about string? Isn't it about time somebody knitted themselves a Mini-ITX Case? We predict ebay will be inundated with literally tens of searches for "G4 Cube". In fact, here's the link to save you some trouble...

When a G4 Cube isn't a G4 Cube

It looks identical to an Apple G4 Cube. However, underneath the beautiful skin and outfit, the heart and soul of the Cube was transplanted with an x86 compatible CPU and powered by GNU/Linux operating system. The above picture showing my Cube running RedHat Linux 8.0 and is connected with my PC's CRT monitor and mouse/keyboard. Except initial OS installation my Cube will be running headless.

What it does

The Cube is to replace my aging AMD K6-2 home server. It will mainly serve the following functions:

File serving
- SMB, NFS and Netatalk
- FTP
Apache web server powering my Weblog
MySQL RDBMS as the backend

The Case

I brought this G4 Cube housing during a local Mac user group expo for about USD 60. Sure enough, the hard drive, the G4 chip and the logic board have been removed. Just left a barebone housing.

The Apple G4 Cube used a fanless design. Hence it needed such a huge heatsink for cooling.