Attractive platform for Debian people interested in ARM: NSLU2
While ARM is a very important platform, support for it in Debian has
faced a number of problems recently: there was no developer accessible
machine for a long time (they're two now), buildds sometimes have a
hard time keeping up, etc. Most importantly, there are not enough
people actively involved in the ARM port. We need more people doing
debian-installer and kernel work, and track other ARM related issues.
One reason why few people are working on ARM is probably the lack of
a cheap platform that can be used for development. Fortunately, this
problem has now been addressed. Over the last few months, I worked
(in collaboration of the NSLU2-Linux project) on debian-installer
support for the Linksys NSLU2, a sub $100 device with 32 MB RAM,
Ethernet (which needs a non-free driver) and two USB ports. You can
attach a USB disk and run a full Debian system on this device.
While there have been some instructions on the web about how to get
Debian going on the NSLU2, basic support for the device is now
included in debian-installer as of beta2. In other words, you can do
a user-friendly installation and it will just work.
Instructions can be found at http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/
Future work:
In the future, the NSLU2-Linux people and I will add more support for
other ARM based consumer devices, such as Network Attached Storage
(NAS) devices (basically a hard drive with a CPU/RAM and Ethernet,
sometimes also including wireless; in other words, a perfect platform
for Debian).
On a related note, I'm also working on getting debian-installer going
on a number of MIPS based consumer devices, such as the Netgear
WGT634U wireless router. However, this work has not reached the
maturity of NSLU2 support yet. Please visit
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/bcm947xx/ for a status overview and TODO
list.
Acknowledgements:
- The NSLU2-Linux team for doing most of the upstream work (e.g.
kernel), and for donating a NSLU2 to me.
- The debian-installer team for creating such an excellent system
to which new platforms can be added relatively easily.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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