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Full Debian ARM for Under $200
An anonymous reader writes "With minor elbow grease, you can now set yourself up with a complete Debian ARM Linux box for under $200. This is thanks to Peter Korsgaard, who figured out a cool byteswapped kernel hack for the little $99 Linksys NSLU2. Add a $99 USB harddrive, and the tiny, cute, quiet 'Slug' can run any of about 16,000 Debian ARM packages, 24x7, for pennies per month worth of electricity, since ARM is still orders of magnitude more power-efficient than anything x86. Serve files, music, web pages, printers, backups, kernel images, webcams/motion detection, firewalls/routers, wireless access point... or whatever. Oh, did I mention you can overclock the Slug?"
The Linksys NSLU2 has already been hacked so you can run your own applications on it. :-)
OpenWRT is a similar thing for the Linksys WRT54G and GS wireless routers. Same goes for the Asus WL500 series. Linux forever! heh
http://www.slimdevices.com/
get of their older devices for cheap on ebay, they rock. i've got 5 of them scattered throughout my house (3 different models, all running off the same server software on my debian box).
This is not an overclock. For reasons unknown, Linksys chose to clock the unit at 133mhz. The chip is spec'ed by intel to run at 266mhz w/o cooling. So your not overclocking your un-underclocking :-)
If you don't need a distro as large as Debian, you can run Unslung, which does support the built-in Ethernet.
Unslung uses ipkg for package management and has a simple installation using the native firmware. It is very stable, since it has been available almost since the Linksys product was announced. It is actively being developed and you can talk to the developers via IRC at #nslu2-linux on Freenode.
There is also a Yahoo group for running Linux on the NSLU2.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Unslung can be installed without using a serial port modification, because it simply uses the built-in Linksys web administration to upgrade the firmware to the Unslung distribution.
Once Unslung is installed, it only takes a matter of minutes to have your NSLU2 running Samba, OpenSSH, Apache, Slimserver, and even Asterisk!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
The crippling factor on the NSLU2 is the limited memory. Fine for what it's intended to do, but they to expand it's capabilities, and you hit the wall. Many people have this problem when trying to use it as a UPnP Mediaserver (using Twonkyvision). The hardware is simply not powerfull enough, or enough memory to cope with large scale media databases and heavy network media streaming.