James' Tech Blog

So why would anyone choose debian over OpenWRT on their Seagate Dockstar? Why go with OpenWRT? Let me clutter the internet with my opinions:

Why Debian:

You can make an actual “computer”. All you need is either some kind of USB LCD or USB VGA adapter and you have a display pretty easy. Well, LCD would not be that practical, you might as well have OpenWRT then. Some guy got on engadget for doing this. Big deal, I hacked an Xbox powersupply to power my dockstar and 2 harddrives! Come on engadet!!!

You want to use programs that aren’t compiled for OpenWRT. In my case, there is no mythtv package for OpenWRT let alone all it’s dependencies.

You feel more comfortable with a “real” distro. OpenWRT is real, but debian is meant to be played around with so it’s geared toward the “middle-of-the-road” end-user.

You have some special USB gadgets that require kernel modules that OpenWRT doesn’t have.

Why OpenWRT:

It will fit many times over in the NAND! Even with a lot of packages it will only take 8MB. This leaves more USB ports open for drives. Also, you don’t need to worry about the bootloader cause it’ll just boot the NAND.

You’re making a headless server, like how it’s supposed to be. Even using a USB drive, you can make a pretty robust server out of these things. I think I saw someone use it as an asterisk backend. If all you want is file and print sharing debian is total overkill (so is OpenWRT).

With the right wireless adapter you could turn this into a wireless router with a gigE port.

You want a proxy on your network. You could easily set this up using squid. If all you needed was a proxy, again, debian would be overkill.

You know what you’re doing and know that OpenWRT is really flexible, especially if you have the build system setup.

Otherwise, it’s not really going to matter. Debian isn’t built with all the gcc flags that could speed up programs or reduce their memory requirements, I’m not sure if OpenWRT build with a lot either probably just -Os for smaller binaries. The only way you’re going to see a lot of improvements is if you use NAND instead of some slow USB harddrive. Well, add your opinions in the comments!

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