Construction

The case top pops off the Square One by removing the four screws located at the corners on the bottom of the case (Figure 2). Two additional screws on the bottom attach the 320GB Hitachi DeskStar hard drive to standoffs above the circuit board.

It’s powered by an ARM922T 32-bit RISC CPU with 16KB L1 cache, and has 64 MB of SDRAM and 4 MB of Flash ROM. As you might suspect, the underlying operating system is based on a Linux 2.4.18 Kernel. 

Figure 2: Square One Interior with disk drive removed

Light pipes fit over LEDs mounted on the circuit board to provide front panel status indicators. There also appears to be an empty slot for additional memory, but Quad Micro Works didn’t supply any information about what type of memory to use for upgrades. A small, barely audible fan, located near the data connector for the disk drive, keeps the Square One cool.

Figure 3: Square One with disk drive mounted

Setup

For consumers who don’t want to use the advanced Internet features, the basic setup of the Square One is quite simple. For those who don’t read instruction manuals, a 12" X 18" single page quick start guide will get you up and running in five steps. Practically speaking, if your ISP provides you with an IP address automatically and doesn’t require PPPoE login, you can plug the WAN port into your modem, and your computer into one of the LAN ports, and you’ll be up and running. 

By default, Square One’s DHCP server passes out addresses on the 192.168.1.0/24 network. The default web management port is on a non-standard port (since port 80 is used by the Apache server), so logging on requires you to include the port number in the URL (http://192.168.1.1:8090). 

The first time you log into the Square One, you can run the Setup Wizard (Figure 4). Of course, if you’ve already confirmed that you’re connected to the Internet, you can bypass that step.

Figure 4: Square One Personal Internet Server Web Admin home page