Soekris

Recently, I’ve come into ownership of a couple of soekris boxes. They’re the old 4501 model, so they’re a little underpowered compared to soekris’ more recent offerings. However, I’m not one to turn down cool free hardware, so I took the two boxes, and have been playing with ideas about what I can do with them.

However, doing anything with them requires first getting an OS on them. Now, I don’t recall if I’d ever blogged about my previous experience with a soekris box, but it was the same model, several years ago now, and a request to put FreeBSD on it. Well, some of you may know that FreeBSD isn’t always the easiest to work with, as well as the only way (available to me at the time) to get software on the box was to PXE boot it. PXE + FreeBSD + Marginally compatible embedded hardware = a few weeks of wasted time and no success.

Needless to say I dumped the idea of running FreeBSD. How about something a little easier to work with, I dunno… Debian. I found a rough tutorial of some guy who’d put debian on his soekris box. It’s an old version sure, but it ran. So, I figured, what the hell, I’ll do the same.

Through some relatively minor trials and tribulations I’ve managed to get an install of Debian 5 onto my soekris box. However, you’ll need at least a 1GB CF card. It seems the minimal install was about 600MB after everything was unpacked. Plus you’ll want to leave yourself some extra room for your files or swap space. (Some people say you shouldn’t use swap space on flash memory because it can cause sectors to go bad. This may be true, but I’m willing to sacrifice a few sectors over time to get some extra ram space when the built in only adds up to 64MB.)

I’m not prepared this evening to write the full tutorial on how to install Debian on a soekris box. First I want to experiment with newer versions / versions of Ubuntu. Once I’ve done a bit of that I’ll write a little tutorial here about how to get it on there.

For now, Nigel out.