DevOnLinux

See you to Bruxelles!

A little howto dedicated to install IPKG on Synology DS209+II, a great Nas which has installed a custom GPL Operating System based on GNU/Linux.
IPKG is a lightweight package management system, similar to Debian DPKG.

Step below are based on this wiki page of synology.

1. Open an ssh connection to your nas, i.e. ssh root@your.local.ip
2. Check the cpu type of the nas. cat /proc/cpuinfo. In my case it was Freescale Semiconductor MPC8544 DS but as reported here it’s an error and the correct CPU model is the 8533.
3. Now go to this page and search for your cpu type (ARM, PPC or ATOM)
4. The bootstrap script for mpc8533 it’s the same of mpc8543. You can download it here, but I prefer to download by wget as described in the next step.
5. Go to tmp directory, cd /volume1/@tmp, and download it: wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/syno-e500/cross/unstable/syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-7_powerpc.xsh
6. give it execution authorization, chmod +x syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-7_powerpc.xsh
7. Ok, execute it with sh syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-7_powerpc.xsh and let script make its work. After a while and many lines below the scripts will echo a “Setup complete”.
8. IPKG is installed so it’s time to reboot nas machine
9. When the system is restarted, connect back with ssh.
10. First time it’s a good thing to update ipkg package list: ipkg update
11. We have finished, it’s time to have fun with ipkg and install any package we desire. In our case we have installed rsnapshot, a great utility for backup automatization in the company lan.

I was looking for an explanation of ext4 main features when I found this great discussion on a launchpad bug report.
The most important explanations are said by Thedore T’so (#45, #60, #62,etc.) , a kernel hacker and actually maintainer of ext4 filesystem. Recently T’so (January 2010) is employed by Google just for work on kernel, filesystem and storage stuff.

It’s for reasons like these that I like Free Software and Open Source.
Only with this methodology of work is possible this tight collaboration and head to head for all developers around the word.

Just one click away! Amazing!