World of XorA

So thanks to a kind OE developer I got a Sheevaplug at cost. If you haven’t heard of the Sheeva before its a Linux device with 512M flash and ram, based on the Marvell Kirkwood CPU. All fitting inside a wall wart.

So I with some cursing removed the default Ubuntu and installed Ångström using UBIFS. Some cursing was caused by the Sheeva failing to work with my usb stick or with my SD cards.

I am impressed with UBIFS it totally blows jffs2 out of the water. Mounts in seconds instead of minutes and doesn’t irreparably break when disk space runs low.

So with some fixes in OE my sheeva is now plugged into a USB hard drive and happilly running Transmission to download torrents. The 1.2GHz processor is easily fast enough for a headless box. The enormous RAM is a dream to work with on an embedded device. I still have some more improvements to test and move into OE so Ångström can benefit from them. But all is good so far!