This is just the short version of what I did to put gentoo on a Seagate Dockstar. What does “short version” mean? It means that it just points to the relevant bits of the relevant guides that I followed to make it work. If I have time at some point I intend on posting a more full version so this “guide” does not have to rely on someone else’s “guide” that may not be there later.
DISCLAIMER: This site and any of it’s admins/moderators/staff and myself cannot be held responsible if anyone follows this “guide” and damages or “bricks” their dockstar (or damages anything else) while using, in full or in part, the information presented here. Use this information at your own risk!
The hardware I used was a Seagate Dockstar model# STDSA10G-RK with an external FreeAgent Go hard disk model# ST903203FGA2E1-RK
Here is what I did:
First I went here:
http://www.plugapps.com/index.php5?title=PlugApps:Pogoplug_Setboot
and followed everything up to “Things To Do After First Boot“.
Make sure you run the command to tell it you want to use ext3 for you boot partition.
Then I went here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml?part=1&chap=4
I made the whole drive one big ext3 partition because I suspected that the uBoot bootloader that I used wouldn’t accept more then one partition.
I didn’t actually play with it though.
I followed the instructions up to “7.b. Installing the Sources”
Instead of a swap partition, I made a 1GB swap file like this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/gentoo/.swapfile count=2M mkswap /mnt/gentoo/.swapfile swapon /mnt/gentoo/.swapfile
Make sure you add the swap file to fstab so that it gets used otherwise you will get compile failures when the dockstar runs out of memory.
Then I went here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/sheevaplug/install.xml#doc_chap5
I followed just the instructions for “5. Installing Gentoo”
Note: I didn’t use vanilla-sources, I used gentoo-sources
If you have any kernel modules I recommend you “make modules”.
Then I continued from here (7.f. Kernel Modules):
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml?part=1&chap=7#doc_chap6
and followed the rest of the handbook until the end.
Some things worth mentioning…
Fail2Ban-0.8.4-r2, Shorewall-Perl-4.2.11.1 and Nut-2.4.3-r2 all installed and ran just fine even though they were masked by “missing keyword”
If you want PHP, go with 5.3.3 or greater otherwise you may get Segmentation Faults.
If, for some reason, you want recursive DNS use unbound (version 1.4.3 worked for me). pdns-recursor versions 3.1.7.2 and 3.2 use the function “swapcontext” which is not supported by glibc (version 2.11.2-r3 and most likely not any other version either) on arm.
The front LED does not work other then blinking green while uBoot is loading. I haven’t looked in to this.