James' Tech Blog

So I actually bought the WD Element drive to go with my new Seagate Dockstar! I bought 2 from woot.com for $20 a piece. I will be documenting what I did for posterity and hopefully usefullness for someone else.
There are 2 good websites for this:
[1] http://www.plugapps.com
[2] http://ahsoftware.de/dockstar/

I started with the latter. I will be using Gentoo on it (sorry plugboxlinux guys). I have a spare WRT that I hooked the dockstar and my desktop up to so that we were linked, but not on the internet. First follow the instructions on [2] to backup the MTD. I gzipped the images after I dd. There was probably an elegant way to do it all in one command using PIPE, but I didn’t bother doing it. MTD3 compressed really well presumable because it’s full of 0’s. Also, disable hbmgr from starting up on boot.

Next I hooked everything up to the “real” network so I could move on to [1] where we download blparam. I just ran blparam > out to a text file to save the original boot env. Then onward to update the bootloader. Then back to [2]! The only difference is that I will use the u-boot from [1] so root has to be /dev/sda1.

For u-boot I used the u-boot install script from [3]. It’s pretty safe, i.e. it won’t write to your USB. It just flashes the Plugapps u-boot.

[3] PlugApps:Pogoplug Setboot – PlugApps

After that it’s pretty much plug and chug. I set up my desktop as a distcc node using crossdev. It has an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ so it compiles almost anything pretty quick. Setting that up is pretty trivial, but just for reference:
[4] Gentoo DistCC guide
[5] Gentoo Crossdev guide

I had some problems with a couple packages compiling. Specifically xmlrpc-c. I found a sheeva binhost [6]. Yeah it’s “sheeva” but it’s the same processor so it should work just fine. That got me past that, but QT just wouldn’t build. I was trying to get Mythtv installed.

[6]Mark’s blog

After a couple days beating my head against the wall I found that there is a Debian group that compiled Mythtv for ARMv5e [7]. Not only that, but some very nice guy Jeff figured out how to install Debian on the dockstar [8].

[7]Debian Multimedia Packages
[8]Install Debian on your Dockstar or Pogoplug

So, alas, I tarred all my gentoo files on the root. Rebooted into stock firmware and deleted the files from the gentoo root. Then follow Jeff’s guide [8]. Well, mostly, I downloaded his script and realized it was a full-blown install u-boot and everything! I did not need that. I just cut to the chase: download the base.tar.bz2 file, untar, download sheeva kernel/modules, untar those too, cp kernel to uImage, make a new fstab, REBOOT. Then do normal Debian stuff.

I suck at Debian, but I’ll mention what I remember doing. Change timezone to America/Los_Angeles, do apt-get stuff: add debian-multimedia to pull in Mythtv. Getting Mythtv was nearly trivial. Because dockstar is headless no Xorg. No problem I have more than 1 computer that does. The only thing I needed to do was turn on TCP for my Xorg then xhost + to allow everybody to connect to it. Then on dockstar run mythtv-setup. Done!

So future work:

OpenWRT

Fix Gentoo

Make a custom initramfs to boot whatever I want