New special purpose distributions - Firmware Linux and NSLU2-Linux

Posted Jan 4, 2007 9:03 UTC (Thu) by joey (guest, #328)
Parent article: New special purpose distributions - Firmware Linux and NSLU2-Linux

The article on smallbuilder is quite nice, just a few comments on the Debian installation part of it:

Looks like his terminal wasn't utf-8-enabled, probably, thus the ugly screenshots.
Debian's kernel for the nslu2 already uses the free ethernet driver. However, that driver still needs some non-free firmware, so the installation image will still not be distributed directly from debian, but still via slug-firmware.net, which can do the clickthru license thing.
I highly recommend reading /usr/share/doc/nslu2-utils/README.Debian on a debian slug system. It has some tips for making the system much more robust by, for example, enabling logging of the entire boot process (which would have saved some ugly debugging described in the article).
The issue with /etc/network/interfaces is probably netcfg bug #403706, and I'd love to hear a bit more details about it, since we're still working to solve that bug.