tinyhack.com

I have prepared a firmware and tutorial to Install Debian here, this time without the need for serial port. I have tested this, and it seems that everything works. But of course I will not be responsible if anything happens. If you think there are some missing, unclear or inaccurate steps, or if you doubt about something, then don’t install it. If you have anything to ask just email to yohanes [at] gmail.com, or just post your questions as comments.

My wife agrees that I can buy another Agestar to hack and use the other one for our network storage. With this new Agestar I can continue my hacks. Currently I am working on building a firmware that can be used to install Debian without serial port. On the first stage, I will build a generic firmware without automatic installer, so the user still needs to do some manual steps to install Debian. So it is something like the manual Debian install on NSLU2 (http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/unpack.html).  Actually because this is generic command line, you would be able to install Gentoo or something else. The next step would be to make an automatic installer like in NSLU2(http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html).

The main reason why I started with manual installer is because I am not yet familiar with the Debian installer. Currently the manual installer is almost complete, I just need to test it thoroughly to make sure that this will really works without serial port. I hope I can release this in the next few days (or this weekend at the latest).

I ported STAR 9100 network driver without a documentation, I just blindly use the old driver and modify it to fit with all of the changes in the networking stuff since kernel 2.4.27. The driver claims to support scatter/gather I/O, but there is no implementation of scatter gather I/O in the hard_start_xmit function. I don’t know whether this device supports it or not, so I just change this line:

dev->features |= NETIF_F_SG|NETIF_F_IP_CSUM

to this:

dev->features |= NETIF_F_IP_CSUM

http://tinyhack.com/agestar/patch-2.6.25.4-for-agestar-20080622.bz2

And now the sendfile function works (although it would be faster if the driver supports scatter/gather IO).

This is the latest patch (add NAPI to the network driver):
http://tinyhack.com/agestar/patch-2.6.25.4-for-agestar-20080621.bz2

I have uploaded the instruction on how to install Debian on Agestar NCB3AST at:

http://tinyhack.com/agestar/

I am also testing exposing my Agestar NCB3AST to the world, I have installed a web server on my device. The same information above can be accessed at:

http://irina.homelinux.com/

Please note that the later URL may not always available. First, my bandwidth is limited, and second, sometimes I still develop and/or test something on it that needs restarting the device.

First the bad news: the network driver in the new kernel is not performing very well, if i remember correctly, this is about twice slower than the original kernel. The maximum speed is around 2.75 mb/s for FTP , 1.4-1.50 mb/s for SAMBA, and 618 kb/s for SSHFS. I have tried implementing NAPI (I will upload the patch soon), but it doesn’t help very much. I have tried to optimize the kernel settings, but no luck so far.

Now, the good news: I have been able to install Debian Etch for ARM in my Agestar using the instruction in here: http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:install_debian. Of course there are differences in booting, and configuring stuff, but the steps to produce the root file system are the same. I have also managed to write new kernel to the flash (by using dd if=bootpImage of=/dev/mtdblock1), so now my agestar will go directly to Debian when i turned it on.

I will clean up the code, and write the instruction on how to install Debian this weekend.

I have two computers at home connected to my WRT54GL (a variant of WRT54G) through cables. Using SSH i can easily shut down my computer, and using Wake On Lan, I can wake them up again when I need them. Here are some of my notes after setting up the wake on LAN:

1. You need to activate wake on LAN feature in the BIOS.
2. You need to set your network card to wake on LAN using ethtool. This command needs to be inserted to your startup/network script, because in each restart you will need to set it again.
3. Some network card will wake using the program wol, but some must use etherwake.
4. Wake on LAN only works in cable/wired connection (wireless connection will not work).

Fedora is good, and gets updated every 6 months, but sometimes I think it is too fast for me. In every new version, they will change some daemon that breaks a lot of things that I have painfully set up in the previous version. After thinking about it, I try to use Debian. After few weeks using it, I already felt comfortable with it. I am also happy because I found a nearby Debian mirror in Thailand (http://www.debianclub.org) which is very fast to access from my home. Here are some things that you may need to know about debian:

Network configuration is at /etc/network/interfaces
Some useful apt-get commands are:
- apt-get install packagename
- apt-get remove packagename
- apt-get clean (otherwise you will use a large disk space for package cache)

some useful dpkg commands:
- dpkg -l to list all installed packages
- dpkg -L packagename to list files in that package
- dpkg -S /path/to/file to check to which package that file belongs

Another useful command is update-alternatives to update alternatives for a program (use this after installing java, etc)

I found a link about someone asking for Debian tips (he is a FreeBSD guy), and the answers he gets is quite good, I think the answers are applicable to anyone switching from another Unix or another Linux distro to debian): http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/234.