After I read about a quite inexpensive (about 65 to 75€) embedded system on a forum two weeks ago, I needed to get one of these myself. The system has two USB host ports and an ethernet interface, 32MB SD-RAM, 8MB flash memory and a 266MHz ARM (Intel XScale) CPU (underclocked @133 MHz until mid 2006 production dates). It’s running Linux with a modified RedBoot bootloader. It’s originally intended to be a NAS server for USB hard drives but can be flashed with different Linux kernels and images. Unfortunately it’s already getting old (first released in 2004) and was reported to be discontinued so I had to decide to buy it now or never. I bought it:
If that device is completely new to you, the article on Wikipedia (en/de) may provide a good starting point for more information on what is possible. If you get interested in it, nslu2-linux.org provides a great resource to answer almost all your questions.
My goal is to get Asterisk, DHCP, DNS, OpenVPN and maybe a small webserver to run on it. However I haven’t reached that yet. (Click the link below to read more.) Continue reading “Slug (Linksys NSLU2)”