Next was the installation of CVS to control all my development sources.  The CVS installation was a straight forward ipkg installation, then once I’d figured how to create the repository, it was all done. 

The biggest difficulty was getting eclipse to communicate with CVS on the NSLU2, due to the fact that I’d used public/private key certificates to log onto the box through SSH.  I used puttgen to create the keys, but didn’t realise there was different formats of private key files.  Eclipse wanted the openSSH format.  Good job then that puttygen allows you to save the key in that format!

Next, I instaleld CVSWEB into the lighttp webserver.  This was a perl application, so I needed to ensure I had all the relevent perl packages installed, plus I needed to download a few other libraries from CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/)

Once I’d configured Lighttp to work with both perl and PHP (which was a bit of a challenge) then CVSWEB worked fine.  Even better, as I’d now compiled ENSCRIPT (see earlier post), CVSWeb uses ENSCRIPT to colour code the source when you view or diff it!

So next on the Slug trail was the installation of CUPS.

It’s a straight forward optware package install.  Then you set up you printer, and away you go.  This network enables the printer so it can be used from anywhere on the network.  It also spools the jobs and manages the print queue, so you can print even when the printer is turned off, and as soon as you turn it on, it starts churning away.

I’ve compiled and got a working version of GNU Enscript v1.6.4 on my NSLU2 (slug) running Unslung v6.10

“Enscript converts ASCII files to PostScript and spools generated PostScript output to the specified printer or leaves it to file. Enscript can be easily extended to handle different output media and it has many options that can be used to customize printouts.”

Should other people be interested in this, I’ve made available both the source and binary versions here:

Binary: [download#16#nohits]
Source: [download#17#nohits]

I might see about building this into an optware package for easier installation, but it may take some time.

The binary currently runs from

/opt/share/enscript/bin/enscript

So next in my quest for the slug was to get the device streaming audio/video/pictures to my X-box 360.  This isn’t quite as simple as it should be.  The 360 requires a uPnP Media Server to feed media to it.  It just so happens that media player 11 and Windows media connect are uPnP Media servers, but fear not…

There are quite a few uPnP Media Servers available for the NSLU2, and after trying a couple, I decided on sticking with Twonkymedia as it worked so much better than the others.  The installation was a breeze, with a windows executable doing almost all the hard work for me, then I simply configured it in the web interface and it was up and running.

After just a few hours I purchased a licence key for the software and now have it set up and running like a dream.

So on purchasing the NSLU2 (known affectionately as ‘the slug’) the very first thing I did was to move all the data off my 2 500GB external USB disks to make them empty.

The slug supports NTFS file systems (Windows 2000/XP) but only on one of the USB sockets, and its preferable to format the disks using the web interface of the slug – formatting them to the linux EXT3 standard.

So – once I’d formatted it, and got it to boot up, I created a share within the web interface and copied a few files to it to make sure it worked, and all was good.  The only challenging bit – if you haven’t got a linksys network you’ll have to change the IP address on the slug – this is defaulted to 192.168.1.77.  I’ve got a linksys router so I found it straight away, but I stil changed the IP.

Of course – this means that the slug is simply acting as a file server on the network, enabling my USB drives as network attached storage –  but it doesn’t stop there…

The next stop was: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

Given that the slug is essentially a linux server, the source for the operating system has been released by linksys under the GPL, so is available for all.  Some enterprising people have taken the said source, and have created various firmwares to flash onto the slug to make it do an awful lot more.

 I read a few pages and then decided I’d install the Unslung firmware (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/NewUsersGuide) given it is the version most similar to the Linksys firmware and the most straight forward for beginners.  I read through the install guide (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/InstallUnslungFirmware) and then decided to flash my slug using the Linksys web interface, knowing there was no easy way back should it all go wrong…

The install went perfectly fine – within minutes I was ‘unslung’.  I then followed the instructions to the letter in order to ‘unsling’ my slug – i.e. get linux running on the hard disk rather than from a ram disk in the slugs limited memory.

Again this wen’t well and within a couple of hours, I had a linux box running on the network with 1TB of space!