[Lancaster] pet slug

[Martyn Welch]

andy baxter wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Last week I bought a 'slug' (linksys NSLU2 ethernet appliance) on eBay. 
> It's just arrived in the post today. It's a tiny thing, about the size 
> of my hand, with 2 usb2 ports and an ethernet port on the back, and a 
> 233 MHz ARM processor inside. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 .
> 
> It's meant for plugging usb hard drives into - you can plug in 2 drives 
> and they come up as windows network shares. I've tested it like this, 
> and it seems pretty good - fast enough to stream video over the network. 
> But the important point is its based on linux, and is reflashable, so 
> you can put pretty much anything you like on it. I'm looking forward to 
> putting debian on it and setting it up as a home web server and whatever 
> else I can think of. Being silent and low power, I'm happy leaving it 
> switched on all the time in my flat, which I wasn't with the old, rather 
> noisy, machine I had before.
> 

Hi Andy,

I'd suggest giving Debian a miss, instead take a look at OpenEmbedded. 
It's a system for cross-compiling minimal Linux images. At an educated 
guess, the slug has a minimal amount of Flash for the root file system 
and minimal RAM. I'm not sure you will have a lot of luck with Debian, 
though I understand that there is an Embedded Debian project.

Martyn