new toy: Sheevaplug...

I have heard of these for a year now, I finally got the office to buy one for testing and evaluation. The Sheevaplug is a Marvell chipsets "plug computing" embedded network computer. It runs linux and is a cute little thing for many uses. for example, I'm using one to harvest images from the internet for touch-panels. Weather radar, etc all get's pulled to a single device and then the other devices pull from there. This eliminates internet traffic and allows smart decisions. If the weather.com radar is unavailable, grab it from another location.

There are a few things you need to do when you get your new sheevaplug. I follow the information I found at Cowlark.com and at the http://www.plugcomputer.org/ web pages and community. Lots of great info there. One thing that makes this sheevaplug different from the other embedded platforms available is that there is a nice apt repository set up for it. you can apt-get install most packages you need. Plus the SD card slot on the side allows me to harvest gigabytes of data without causing internal issues.

So here's a quick get-started for this neat little device...

First, the embedded Ubuntu distro that is in it is broken in a few places. Mostly by not paying attention. The first thing you need to do is SSH in after hooking it up.. root Password is nosoup4u, go into /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and delete the supersede domain-mname-servers line. why that was in there to break dhcp DNS resolution I have no idea. save change and reboot.

NOW it has working network parameters.. Let's update it....

mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
apt-get update
apt-get install ntpdate
ntpdate pool.ntp.org

I want php and a webserver... so I add the following...

apt-get install lighttpd
apt-get install php5-cgi
apt-get install wget -- I do that just for fun wget is a cool tool to have around.

edit the /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

add mod_fastcgi to the server.modules

add fastcgi.server = (".php" => (( "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi", "socket" => "/tmp/php.socket" )))

Mine came with samba installed, so you can adda windows share for a usb driver without much effort.

it's a really cool device. I can see all kinds of uses for it.