No, unfortunately, I’m not ready to give you guys a tutorial yet. Not because I’m not done setting up the box, more because I just haven’t compiled all the files you need to deal with beforehand to get it loading.
I have played with the functionality of the box though. It seems to be working pretty well on Debian 5. Perhaps in some instances a little slower, but that’s a trade off I’ve made. I chose to install a debian distro because it makes my life a lot easier. I’ve traded making my life easier for a tad bit more “bloat.” Most of the time, this isn’t really noticeable. I mainly notice it when doing things like “apt-get” or “make.” While apt is more specific to debian systems (and derivatives) make is more universal. Mostly it’s just that processor speed is rather low, and debian isn’t the absolute lightest linux distro out there.
Something I’ve noticed thru playing with the box is that the clock is horrible at keeping time. Perhaps it’s just because my box is old, but it probably loses a little more than a second per minute. I had originally thought to solve this with ntpd. This would be a nice solution because it will constantly adjust the clock to keep it as accurate as possible. However, this used about 2M of ram constantly. When you’ve only got 64M to work with, that’s a little much. I settled for a cron job that runs once every fifteen minutes to do a one time ntp time sync. This keeps my clock within a few seconds of accurate time, and saves me some ram.
I’ve also installed lighttpd with php support. I plan on using this box to control some stuff via the GPIO lines, so I’d planned on having a little web interface to do that via. Requires a web server and a scripting language I know. Again, I probably sacrificed a little with php on the performance front, for some ease and familiarity. It doesn’t seem to take too much toll on things, and lighttpd is much lighter than apache.
In response to my mention of the GPIO lines, the soekris boxes have broken out the extra GPIO (General Purpose In/Out) lines to a header. This means that I can connect small/low load devices to the processor, and have linux control them. I’ve been searching ’round the web a bit off and on for the past few days to see how I can gain control of these lines. There were some solutions, but they required building a new kernel with certain support in it, as well as compiling a driver. I found that this was the rather complicated way to do this, and found a simple C program that would take care of this for me, and provide a simple “userland” interface. All I have to do is type
./gpio <pin_number> <on/off>
Anyway, I’ll cover all of this in Part 3 when I actually give the tutorial, and the information on setting all of this up. Look forward to it in the near future.