DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

scaramanga wrote:

I think Joao would rather have discussions of Alt-F conducted on its forum.
Regarding your question, see here: http://groups.google.com/group/alt-f/br … 6b607c9463

Yes, but if the post subject in this forum clearly refers to Alt-F I will notice it.

In addition to what was said in the Alt-F forum, did you knew that WD > 2TB disks are shipped with a board for you to install on the PC motherboard?

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/Q … 771087.pdf

This makes me remind the very old days when office software was sold together with a graphics card, as there was no (s)vga or VESA standards for the PC :-O

thebeck wrote:

jcard wrote:

The gdisk executable, for the 86 family, takes about 400KB, and we are low
on flash space -- what could we drop in order to free some memory space?

Good question...

jcard wrote:

-New Alt-F packages:
         automatic-0.6.4, forked-daapd-0.13, alsa-lib-1.0.18, dbus-1.2.26, libantlr-3.2, libavl-0.3.5, libconfuse-2.6, libevent-2.0.10, libgcrypt-1.2.4, libgpg-error-1.6, libunistring-0.9.3, mxml-2.6, libcurl-7.19.6, ncurses-5.6, python-2.45, uemacs-4.0.15
-Updated Alt-F packages:
         transmission-2.22, minidlna-1.0.19, mediatomb-0.12.1, ffmpeg-0.6.1, avahi-0.6.28, netatalk-2.1.5, cups-1.4.6, hplip-3.11.1, openssh-0.9.8.r, vsftpd-2.3.4, rsync-3.0.7, wget-1.11.4, dropbear-0.53, dnsmasq-2.57, e2fsprogs-1.41.14, smartmontools-5.40, dosfstools-3.0.11, ntfs-3g-2010.10.2, ethtool-2.6.36, Berkeley-db-4.8.30, libiconv-1.13.1, libfuse-2.8.5, libdaemon-0.14, tiff-3.9.4, jpeg-8c, taglib-1.6.3,  zlib-1.2.5

What about moving transmission, minidlna, mediatomb, avahi, netatalk, rsync, ntfs, and Berkeley db to an add-on package format?

Everything that I call packages is to be installed on disk, not on flash (which has only 8MB). The only software installed on flash can be seen here:

https://sites.google.com/site/altfirmware/home/software

while the software to be installed on disk can be seen here:

https://sites.google.com/site/altfirmware/home/packages

Presumably, these can be uploaded via a web interface after the fact based on what the end-user actually wants/needs.

As they already are.

I would suspect that other packages may be a candidate for an add-on instead of being included in the firmware, too.  What do you think?

Taking this to the extreme, we could make all (or most) of busybox an add-on instead of baking into the firmware.  In this extreme case (assuming this is possible), could we free up enough kernel space to give you room for more core capabilities?

For that we already have Debian, where everything is installed on disk, no compromises.

What makes Alt-F distinct from Debian is that, like in the stock firmware, the file serving apps exists in flash. You can change disks and the box will still work, what does not happens with Debian, that needs the disk where it is installed.

To some respect, this is getting towards a fun_plug approach.  Since you have some control over this, would a fun_plug and fun_plug_shutdown script be possible?  The later being a deficiency of the current D-Link firmware in that it is currently not possible to "safely" stop the various fun_plug services on shutdown.

Looking forward to your thoughts. :-)

Alt-F was motivated by that deficiency in the stock firmware. I first wrote yafsck (yet another filesystem check) and then chkbutton2, to provide a clean shutdown and power-up.
But soon I realized that the hand-full of proprietary (not open source) binaries in the box make live too difficult, and I didn't like to guess what those binaries could be doing. So Alt-F was born.

There is no need for a fun_plug in Alt-F. It's a completely open linux "distribution", you can do whatever you want with it. And there are initialization and finalization scripts that you can customize. There is even a mechanism to override the flash-memory settings/scripts/binaries, storing them on disk.

Thanks for your comments