Hands on dreamplug

Update: Óscar García gently published a similar spanish version of this article.

Couple of weeks ago I received my dreamplug, from NewIT. Though I knew some software troubles in device, I remains hopeful. However when I unpacked and powered on the plug I got a number of problems. This is the history about these problems and their solutions. I hope that my experience can be useful for anyone who take the same model and have the same problems. Afterall, the NewIT forum has a number of posts about these and other problems, so reading it is recommended.

The first problem that I found was a bad partition table, which is also a well-known bug in NewIT forums; and the second one is the Ubuntu installation which is not very tiny by default Fortunately, both problems are easy to solve.

These are the steps that I followed to “upgrade” my dreamplug software to a cooler one. Please note that the Globalscale guys do not support other system images and installations AFAIK, so perform this changes under your own responsibility. You are warned!.

pkgcore experience

Last days I reinstalled my Gentoo in my desktop computer, a Dell Dimension C521 using the new package handler pkgcore.

The last months I’ve use official portage, and also new replacement called paludis. The main advantage of this one is being written entirely in C++, so paludis is very fast, but also you can detect some problems when you need to compile some “specials” packages, such qemu, which requires to be compiled with gcc3. If you compile paludis with another version of gcc, you can find a beauty error related to dynamic linking. Obviously, you can solve this problem by hand or with sonme tricks , but I don’t like tricks in production machines.