**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sat May 26 02:59:57 2007 May 26 17:00:28 i'm curious: is there some reason that the unslung firmware doensn't use devfs? May 26 17:01:48 because the linksys firmware doesn't use devfs May 26 17:02:08 Unslung strives for 100% compatability, for good or for bad. May 26 17:02:49 fair enough. May 26 17:03:32 i'm trying to reduce the amount of disk traffic to my usb stick. Does it seem reasonable to use devfs, or is better to copy /dev to a tmpfs file system? May 26 17:04:17 The standard technique used by Linksys fw (and by Unslung when not yet unslung) is the tmpfs approach. May 26 17:05:13 The code to do that is actually in the startup scripts somewhere. You'll find it less frustrating to get it to work if you have a serial console. May 26 17:05:27 hmmm. May 26 17:05:40 However, few people do that. May 26 17:06:00 Perhaps memory is too precious to spend it on a tmpfs for that purpose. May 26 17:06:01 well, i'm not particularly SCARED of that. I did after all "un-underclock" my little slug. May 26 17:06:33 Most find that just touching /.ext3flash is enough to reduce I/O to acceptable levels. May 26 17:06:50 i'm thinking of using the slug as a computer in my car, and I wanted to use only solid state storage. May 26 17:07:06 i'd just like to not be changing flash drives every month. May 26 17:07:33 access to /dev is not going to cause any significant wear May 26 17:08:09 so... just fix /var/log, and then don't worry? May 26 17:08:13 the problem is if you have swap space and have the default atime mount options -- changing those two solve the wear problem May 26 17:08:25 i did touch /.ext3flash May 26 17:08:33 Everything else, just leave on the device. I have one that's been running that way for near on two years. May 26 17:08:55 thanks for the tips. May 26 17:09:22 http://brainwagon.org/slug/index.html is on my slug. :-) May 26 17:09:41 Ok, if you did the .ext3flash, then you should have only infrequent I/O, not nearly enough to cause concern (also the USB devices do load-leveling across the flash memory, so a larger flash device will actually last longer) May 26 17:09:48 it's kind of fun hacking on limited machines. May 26 17:10:21 It certainly highlights the areas of stress. A lot of evil can be hidden behind loads of horsepower! May 26 17:10:25 i'm using a 512M flash now, it's just what I had lying around. 1GB are cheap though. I might put one in. May 26 17:10:49 * mwester has been using a 128Mbyte flash... May 26 17:11:01 I used to run my website on a 60Mhz P5, using 32M of memory, running freebsd and thttpd. The slug has more horsepower than that. :-) May 26 17:11:21 (it did have a bigger disk though) May 26 17:12:06 Yep -- although the 8MByte USB flash devices are on the market. That gets the slug up to 16Mbytes solid-state without a hub. May 26 17:12:19 s/Mbyte/Gbyte/ May 26 17:12:19 mwester meant: Yep -- although the 8MByte USB flash devices are on the market. That gets the slug up to 16Gbytes solid-state without a hub. May 26 17:12:32 thanks capbot May 26 17:12:32 gern geschehen, mwester May 26 17:13:06 they aren't cheap enough to really be in the spirit of the slug though. :-) May 26 17:13:49 my idea for my car computer is to put in a usb sound interface, bluetooth, wireless, and a webcam, mount it all in a box, and dump it in my car. May 26 17:14:02 (maybe a gps too) May 26 17:14:02 True. That's why I used the 128Mbyte unit -- my 1GByte flash drive cost more than the slug, at the time! May 26 17:14:25 rt: then you probably don't want Unslung for the firmware. May 26 17:14:32 probably true. May 26 17:14:42 debian? or the other one? May 26 17:15:08 * rt just recently got back into this stuff after a near two year hiatus. May 26 17:15:16 * rt doesn't have a feel for what's best. May 26 17:15:21 Debian works great, but might be too much "desktop" in flavor (large). I'd suggest the latest versions of SlugOS. May 26 17:15:45 You'll want to set up a development environment so you can build the latest versions yourself. May 26 17:15:57 i know i could read the webpage, but how is installation? should i have a jtag cable on standby? May 26 17:16:44 Install is very easy. No jtag required as long as you do NOT use the Linksys EraseAll tool for loading firmware -- use any of the other tools for that. May 26 17:16:58 Serial console would be good for debugging, but not essential. May 26 17:17:12 Unless you need to work on kernel drivers for the webcam or such. May 26 17:17:17 * rt is surfing. SlugOS/BE? May 26 17:18:00 SlugOS/BE is what used to be called OpenSlug. Big-Endian version of SlugOS. SlugOS/LE is, of course, the little-endian version of same. May 26 17:18:18 You might have better luck with some device drivers with LE May 26 17:18:30 (poorly written X86 drivers may not run in BE mode) May 26 17:18:52 On the other hand, there are still those who claim performance advantages (network mainly) for BE. May 26 17:19:04 Both exist, both work. May 26 17:19:16 hmmm. May 26 17:19:42 SlugOS uses udev, IIRC May 26 17:19:48 And a 2.6 kernel. May 26 17:20:49 so LE uses the Debian packages? May 26 17:22:05 I think it may be able to do so, assuming that the dependencies (library versions, etc) can be met. May 26 17:22:22 I'm not sure, perhaps someone else here mght know? May 26 17:22:43 * mwester runs SlugOS/BE here May 26 17:23:04 I just installed debian onto mine. May 26 17:23:17 What would have the advantage of SlugOS be? May 26 17:23:54 http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html May 26 17:24:03 is this what I need to do to get debian running on the slug? May 26 17:24:59 Lunar_Lamp: SlugOS is a distribution that is tuned to run on such a very small device. For example, it can boot entirely off of the internal flash for recovery or other purposes, something that the full debian release cannot do. May 26 17:25:38 rt, that's the guide I followed. May 26 17:25:56 Also, SlugOS uses the ipkg package manager and other tools better suited for small memory devices, so it can actually run without swap space (again, something you'd not be able to do with debian). May 26 17:27:03 OTOH, debian is debian -- running that on the slug offers a tremendous wealth of applications, plus debian is well documented and general help for how to perform general admin tasks (that are not SLUG specific) can be readily found. May 26 17:27:44 i'm finding the naming conventions of all this rather confusing. May 26 17:30:35 NSLU2, aka SLUG = hardware. Unslung = "open" version of Linksys firmware. SlugOS = linux distribution for small ARM-based devices such as the slug. Debian = the Debian linux distribution, which is available for ARM processors. May 26 17:31:17 i guess i was confused that there is a Debian/NSLU2 distribution, which is different than Debian/Slug, which is now called SlugOS, right? May 26 17:32:10 I've not heard the specific term Debian/Slug -- there was a "debianslug" at one time; that has become SlugOS/LE now May 26 17:32:38 so... be or le? does it really matter? May 26 17:32:58 http://www.slug-firmware.net/s-dls.php May 26 17:33:15 has DebianSlug scattered all over it, which was what was confusing me. May 26 17:34:05 Dunno. It used to matter. Some claim that it still matters, and network performance is better with BE. I favor BE because it's more compatible with Unslung, which is a poor reason, but it made sense for me at the time. May 26 17:34:51 allrighty. i'll use the same pitiful justification. May 26 17:34:52 :-) May 26 17:35:45 It's easy to switch, that's the good news. May 26 17:38:21 so... we just pull the disk, reset the thing, put it in upgrade, and upslug2 the new imag? May 26 17:39:20 Yep. May 26 17:43:52 flashing! May 26 17:43:59 it's so exciting! May 26 17:44:02 :-) May 26 17:46:05 rebooting... May 26 17:48:07 Which image did you flash? May 26 17:53:12 openslug-3.10-beta.bin May 26 17:53:59 it seems to be up, but it doesn't respond to ssh or ping at 192.168.1.77, and doesn't appear to be in my dhcp clients list. May 26 17:54:07 * rt is confused. May 26 17:55:38 rt, is the slug brand-new? or is it possible someone already has set a static IP in it? May 26 17:56:14 it was running openslung, and i left it static at 192.168.1.77 May 26 17:56:21 er.. sorry.. unslung. May 26 17:57:57 you can always flash the original f/w or unslung, set and make sure the static IP, then flash slugosbe May 26 17:58:39 you can also try ping 192.168.1.255 May 26 17:59:12 ah... it is under dhcp apparently. May 26 17:59:17 * rt scanned for it and foudn it. May 26 18:00:32 voila! in! May 26 18:04:23 do i need to do some prep on the memstick before doing a turnup memstick? May 26 18:04:36 and is usb2 or usb1 better for it? May 26 18:10:46 if i do a turnup memstick, will it also do the necessary noatime stuff? May 26 18:14:31 yes, i'd think so May 26 18:14:58 i've only turnup disk, but you can read the turnup script May 26 18:15:05 and search noatime May 26 18:17:16 will do, once it's rebooted. :-) May 26 18:19:05 looks good, noatime is in /etc/fstab. May 26 19:12:52 oooh. May 26 19:12:57 http://brainwagon.org/slug/ May 26 19:13:01 it woiks! May 26 19:14:08 loaded very quick too May 26 19:22:20 well, jef p. (author of thttpd) said that any old computer serving static files should be able to saturate a regular 10M ethernet. May 26 19:22:31 so it's hardly surprising that it works. May 26 19:23:39 * rt wonders what other firmware he could replace this morning. May 26 20:12:04 * caplink811-log is astonished, brainwagon.org replies fast **** ENDING LOGGING AT Sun May 27 02:59:56 2007