James' Tech Blog

You might have seen my Seagate Dockstar post that explained getting Gentoo and Debian running on my Seagate Dockstar. Sorry, I just finished it now cause I have some follow-up stuff going right now. Well, Gentoo and Debian is not enough! I wanted OpenWRT as well. They have been working on sheeva support for awhile now. I was a little weary because their sheeva install seemed like it would write to the flash. This made me nervous because I’m using the secondary u-boot from plugapps which lives in mtd3 right where OpenWRT would like to install! So I hadn’t done it yet, just poke around a bit.

Like every good idea (or bad idea), you can find someone who’s tried it on the internet.Installing OpenWrt on Seagate DockStar HOWTO Now we’re getting somewhere. Kinda like Jeff’s Debian install, it’s mostly about stuff that I either already did or don’t want to do. Specifically skip everything until Building cause that’s where the magic is. Yeah, prebuilt images are nice, but I didn’t want to boot from flash. I wanted to boot from USB. I have been working on getting my WRT54g-L to boot off GPIO-SD so I had configured and built OpenWRT before. Follow the steps, but make sure to make root tar and build in ext2 and USB. I tried to use the patches, but it wouldn’t compile with them so I took them out.

With the OpenWRT built. I untarred it onto a USB thumbdrive that was ext2 (and only 128MB). Plugged it in and rebooted. Oh yeah, I got a FTDI usb-serial cable. I made a little header board to adapt a cable coming off the serial port to the 6-pin FTDI. I watched the boot through the serial port. It went perfect, except there were these weird messages about cowardly not committing jffs. Whatever! My flash is intact and OpenWRT is happy from the USB. I built some “usefull” stuff into my image like openssh instead of dropbear. Changed the default IP address, cause otherwise it would clash with my router.

Then pretty much do normal OpenWRT stuff. It would be cool to get a USB-wireless and USB-wired to run a dockstar as a router. Then you could have and 802.11n wireless and gigabit on the LAN! Awesome.

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