A talk by Quentin Wright for the Rugby LUG
Tuesday, 8th January 2008, 7:30pm
36 Regent Street, Rugby, CV21 2PS (first floor)
The Linksys NSLU2 (Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives), affectionately known as the Slug, makes USB Flash memory or hard disk devices accessible over a network. It has 2 USB ports for the connection of external drives and an ethernet port.
The device runs Linux on an ARM processor, and shortly after its introduction a community project inspired by earlier work on the WRT54G router was started with the objective of running alternative applications on the SLUG. Fairly rapidly a method was discovered to interrupt the start-up sequence, and as they say, the rest is history! Within the space of about 3 months and thanks to the involvement of about 160 participants replacement firmware was in place and much of the Linux ARM software became available. Development has continued and there are now several choices of operating system for the NSLU2 including the original Unslung, (now called Optware), Debian, OpenWRT and SlugOS.
This presentation outlines some of the significant features of these projects as well as hands-on demonstrations.