Install and configure Debian on Nslu2

First of all,

upgrade the firmware using UGUtil from windows ou upslug from a linux box (google is your friend)

Follow this as an excellent tutorial, thank's to the author

If debian should be installed on as usb stick, I recommend to format to stick with a decent swap partition.

then to minimize write to the flash (to keep it long time)

  • Make sure that your drive is mounted with the noatime option. If you don't use noatime, every file read will also perform a write to update the access time information. See Ext3flash for up to date information on achieving this.
  • Look at your log files, and see if you are recording more than you need. You can also instruct syslog to buffer its output, avoiding writes after every line, by putting a - before the filename in syslog.conf.

If you have a swap partition on flash, it might be a good idea to change the kernel's swapping behaviour to minimize swapping.

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60
$ echo "0" > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To make it permanent add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf vm.swappiness=0

Install some usefull tools

$apt-get install nslu2-utils sysvconfig setserial

Sometimes I need to build so

$apt-get install build-essential

Reconfigure locale (was not asked in the install process, strange :-)

$dpkg-reconfigure locales
$reboot

I set locale with US (en_US.UTF-8) and french (fr_FR ISO-8859-1) and set default to french, then to avoid french in message I set in my .bashrc

export LC_MESSAGES='en_US.UTF-8'
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