Gentoo on a Slug? Linksys NSLU2

[tbg]

Is there anyone thinking about trying to use Gentoo on a Linksys NSLU2 ("slug")?

It seems like a natural fit.

I would love it if someone smarter than me took the lead on such a project.

Great opportunity to be a hero.

The NSLU2 is a little Network Attached Storage device that costs about $80 and has an ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports. People are just starting to use it as a Linux machine. I think it's a pretty cool idea.

There is a wiki at:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Main/HomePage

Considering that Gentoo is "compile from source" I would love to see someone figure out how to get it onto a "slug".

[uglyman]

Hi. and YES

I know the guys were talking about this in #gentoo-embedded a while ago, I think one of them has a slug to play with. I have also been thinking about working on this. hmmm... so much to say... so little time. I am at work and have to make believe I am working.

I got interested in the gentoo-embedded project recently and I have been getting some gear together. I have finally gotten all the parts (took a while to ship) and I have plans to build a JTAG interface which helps when working on embedded devices. I also wanted to get a few devices that were convenient to work on for practice. I purchased my slug about two weeks ago. In that two weeks I was the best man in my brothers wedding so I have been awful busy. I am also planning to move soon which will take another chunk of my time away. But I finally have everything I need for my little frankensteinian project I want to do.

I would really like this thing to just run a simple IRC bot for me or something like that, as a proof of concept type situation. I have no interest in actually compiling the system on board or anything like that. I know people do that sometimes, like somebody around here was trying to build a stage 1 gentoo system ON his gamecube. I don't see this as particularly practical (although I admit it might be fun to try). I want to get set up on my desktop machine which runs a very comfortable gentoo environment, and be able to whip up little distros to drop on. The idea is I will hopefully be able to chroot into a little environment and cross compile all the software I need and build up a little image to throw onto the slug, and the other devices.

As one last note before I get back to work here, I dont want to make it sound as if I am the only one doing this, or the first, or any of that. Quite the opposite actually. I have an interest in embedded dev, but I have no real background in it. It is do to the long hard work of the gentoo-embedded team that it is possible for a guy like me to attempt this stuff. hopefully at some point I will be able to contribute something useful to the project, for now I just need to get my gear setup and try a few things out.

you can contact me through any of the info I have in my profile here if you would like to discuss any of this further.

later,
uglyman

[tbg]

Hi Uglyman,

I just saw your response this morning. I have the same problem with respect to work.

I've been making slow progress with my Slug, but as of today it is now at the point where I can log into it from work with ssh. Tonight at home I will probably move my little webserver to run on the slug and not my mini-itx box.

I would actually like to try compiling gentoo from source on a slug. Currently the slug-linux people are building packages for the slug that can be installed with "ipkg install appweb" (for example). I am thinking I might buy a second slug to use as a Gentoo machine once I have my personal website running on my first one.

I haven't given this a lot of thought... are there any examples of building gentoo on alternate archictectures that I should look at to give me a clue about how to approach the problem? The gamecube perhaps?

[uglyman]

Hi tbg, glad to hear you are making progress... I haven't done much with my slug yet, I was sidetracked by another project but I hope to have some time this weekend. Lets keep in touch on this and maybe we can put together some howto information when we get it figured out. My goal when I bought the thing was to get set up so that I can run as few commands as possible on my desktop machine to whip up a new distro to drop on the thing. Then I would like to explain it well enough that anybody familiar with gentoo can make a custom slug image to do whatever they want.

You asked about info on compiling for other arches and I don't have much to point you to yet. There is a few places that I have become aware of, by hanging around #gentoo-embedded on freenode. I have been trying to read the conversation in there in hopes that I would pick up on what all is going on out there.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/index.xml Has some info on who is working on this stuff officially and some of the gentoo related projects that are already out there.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~vapier/CROSS-COMPILE-HOWTO has probably been the single most important thing I have read, related to this project. Mike Frysinger, (vapier) has landed a spot as my hero with some of the stuff he has written.

Although it is offtopic, one of my favorite docs from gentoo.org is also by vapier http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/qmail-howto.xml I was absolutely amazed when I found out how easy it is to set up qmail, horde and all the other stuff in that doc. (NOTE, this would not BE easy if it wasn't for this doc!)

Anyhow you can contact me easily through my IM/e-mail info on my profile, or you can often catch me wandering around freenode irc. Please keep me posted on how you are doing with this, no sense reinventing the wheel after all.

[uglyman]

Just ran across another post that indicates spankY is the author of the cross compile howto... sorry for the confusion, I assumed based on its url. oh well, now I can have 2 heroes

[tbg]

thanks for the tips uglyman.

I moved my webserver at home from my mini-itx last night to my slug:

http://www.thomas144.com

my original interest in using a slug as a webserver was prompted by the thought of finding a computer to host my photos that would consume less electricity. I'm confident that the money I've spent on this project (about $200 plus $50 donated to nslu2-linux.org) will pay for itself in reduced energy costs within 20-30 years.

[uglyman]

ahh the server looks good!
so did you use gentoo for any of this yet? or is it still the regular slug linux distro?

I am also curious what the other 100 dollars was spent on. or maybe the slug is more expensive where you are. I got mine for 99 bucks at staples. I have spent a fair amount on parts to build my JTAG adapter, but nowhere near 100 bucks yet.

[tbg]

I'm just using the ipkg stuff for now. I don't really even understand the environment set up. I'm just installing stuff.

I bought my slug for $78 with shipping from some online place based on whatever pricewatch.com said was the cheapest. I had a spare 250 Gig IDE drive that I had bought on the day after thanksgiving at circuit city that I think cost $99 after rebates (I think there's another rebate check coming but I forget). I got a USB enclosure from Newegg for about $25 on a daily special, so the whole thing is a little more than $200.

[uglyman]

ahh gotcha... I haven't added a HD to mine yet. It still looks like I will have some time sunday to play with this. I am keeping my fingers crossed that my schedule doesn't change.

[Nitropowered]

Any updates on gentoo on SLug?

Like maybe a brief write up?

Some guy put debian on Slug and posted up a how-to on his website.

I don't feel like learning debian. I love the days and days of Stage 1 installs.

[uglyman]

funny I was just thinking about this project the other day... It has been on the back burner for a while but maybe I will get back to it soon. My todo list is finally getting under control I think. if I get anything done on it I will make sure and post the info at uglyman.org. I need to reinstall my desktop machine this weekend... then I will try to get to the slug.

thanks for the reminder...

[Scytale]

Just in case anybody finds this thread, there is a pretty good howto on gentoo-wiki.com.

It doesn't quite work for me, however. If I try to let the slug boot from the attached hard disk with Gentoo on it, I can hear that the disk is mounted, but then it basically does nothing anymore, and I don't have a clue where it's hanging. The /.recovery file gets written, and at the next boot the slug starts its OpenSlug image again.

I've added some "echo foo >>/boot.log" debug statements to the scripts /boot/disk and /etc/default/functions (the swivel() function). The last thing in these logs is the line just before the "if pivot_root" line in swivel(). I don't know whether it's not doing anything after this or if the problem is that it can't write to /boot.log anymore. Or maybe my Gentoo image is somehow misconfigured? The guide isn't very detailed on how to set up configuration files. I'm an experienced Gentoo user, however, so I think (and hope) I've not made any newbie mistake.
_________________
Never stop using your brain.

[Scytale]

Works like a charm now. Found a few pitfalls in the wiki guide and corrected them.
_________________
Never stop using your brain.

[tokka]

I gave this a go yesterday following the wiki with mixed results...

Setup and updating the gentoo install seemed to go fine, but I'm having problems booting.

When I power the slug up, there is initial access to the usb drive, about 5 or 6 seconds, then the drives led flashes like mad for a good 30 sec, so it seems to be booting, but then suddenly the slug resets:(

Then due to /.recovery on the usbdrive it boots off the flash fine.

Anyone with any ideas? The only thing I can think of is that I have bumped the units speed up, and I've read that people have had issues booting off 2.5inch drives after that - though what kind of problem they didn't say.

A couple of issues with the install:

The current portage requires pax-utils, though it's listed as stable on arm, compilation would crap out - using the unstable 0.1.7 seemed to work.

The embedded stage 3 file didn't include openssh.

My slug with the resistor removed running at 266 and with 512M swap is suprising fast - emerge -pvuD world including Perl and gcc took around 12 hours:)

Scytale, if you have a working partition, any chance you could make it available to others, there suddenly seem to be a number of people trying gentoo on NSLU2's, and a working solution for us to play with would be invaluable.

[tokka]

Aha! Look what I found:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-417105.html

Complete instructions for gentoo on a slug - but in German:)

I'm grinding my way through it, following the code and with the odd check with the google translator, just hoping I don't get to the end and find the german for "I give up, it don't work"

[chilla]

eek yep, i wrote it in german. but actually the slug works so fkn good under gentoo - ill rewrite this howto in english for all the other users out there who dont speak german
_________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is two wolves attempting to have a sheep for dinner and finding a well-informed, well-armed sheep."

TU-BS Wiki

[plink212]

I installed using the German howto and must agree it is much better than openslug or even debonaras.
The only annoying thing is that just about every package is masked with missing keyword

Regards

Tim

[squawker]

Followed Chilla's excellent HOWTO first, but the limitations of uClibc were driving me mad, so after days of hacking about I've finally got an armeb-softfloat-linux-gnu chroot bootstrapped. Running 'emerge -e system' natively as I write.

/etc/make.profile -> ../usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/arm

cat /etc/make.conf
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically built this stage
# Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example
CFLAGS="-Os -march=armv5te -mtune=xscale"
CHOST="armeb-softfloat-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="-Os -march=armv5te -mtune=xscale"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arm"
USE="apache2 pam gdbm berkdb ssl imap perl python readline ncurses crypt zlib flac mysql samba maildir cups ppds usb dba vorbis ogg ldap nonfsv4 -ipv6"
FEATURES="-noman -noinfo -nodoc"

(The FEATURES line is a hangover from the uclibc profile and I guess isn't needed for default-linux)

You don't really want to know how many hoops I've jumped through to get to this point. Or maybe you do. Started with 'crossdev -t armeb-softfloat-linux-gnu', then used that to crosscompile ebuilds into a new root. Some packages cross-compiled okay, some didn't. Essential ones that worked were baselayout, busybox, binutils and glibc.

Copied the uClibc ld.so and the libc.so.0/libm.so.0 to the new root, copied over the crosscompiler, which still worked thanks to the uClibc libs being present. Copied over bash too.

Portage refused to work in the hacked up root with bash & gcc still dependent on uClibc. Had to try crosscompiling python, bash and gcc, none of which worked. Then copied the unpacked portage build directories to the new root and finished off the make & install by hand. With native

There were a bunch of other utilities needed - make, sed, gawk.... more that I don't recall. Some crosscompiled okay, others needed the copy/make/install black magic. At last portage seemed to have all the bits needed, so I started 'emerge -e system' - currently at '16 of 96 sys-devel/gcc-3.4.5 Compile'

It'll probably be finished on Tuesday!

Big thanks to Chilla and everyone involved.

Don't forget to de-underclock that Slug, and a serial port is nice too.

[squawker]

Quick update.....

I didn't have groupadd in the changeroot, and the man ebuild needs groupadd, which is part of shadow.
shadow wants a whole feast of other packages installed first, so I skipped man for now with:

[squawker]

Houston, we have an armeb glibc stage3

And its still only Tuesday lunchtime.

New observations...

openssh-4.3_p1 says it can't build with ldap in the USE flags, so I masked it out in /etc/portage/package.mask. Building an older version worked fine. I'm not sure I really want ldap, but I've been intending to learn enough about it to phase out YP/NIS on my network.

I'm trying to build db-4.2.52_p4 without 'nocxx' again now that libtool and friends have been freshened up. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I won't cry too many tears if it doesn't. <- HOORAY, IT WORKED FINE NOW!

And I found out that package.provided won't protect me from a gcc/glibc rebuild if I run 'emerge -e system' again, so I won't try that until I've got this stage3 up and running on my "spare" SLUG.

[tokka]

[Nick C]

[Pete M]

Any of you guys seen this

http://www.revogear.com/

And the Forum here

http://www.kurobox.com/forums/index.php

Got a Kuro Box HG running Gentoo, runs fine

Pete

[squawker]

[tokka]