Debian installer improvements for NAS devices in lenny RC1
There have been a number of improvements to the Debian installer on Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices in the last few months and they are available to users now that RC1 has been released.
We have added support for Marvell's Orion platform. Orion is a system on a chip (SoC) that integrates an ARM CPU, Ethernet, SATA, USB, and other functionality in one chip. The majority of NAS devices that have come out within the last two years are based on Orion chips, so it's exciting to have support for this significant platform in Debian. Specifically, we support the following devices based on Orion: QNAP Turbo Station (TS-109, TS-209, TS-409), HP Media Vault mv2120, and Buffalo Kurobox Pro (with more to come later).
Here are some other newsworthy improvements and changes:
- When a static IP address is set in the original system that is the default from the vendor, this address will now be used. In the past, the installer would use DHCP in this case but users found this confusing. This affects the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100.
- If a static IP configuration is used in the original system but this configuration is incomplete (i.e. IP address or DNS are missing), then the installer will use DHCP (instead of hanging during start). This affects the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100.
- On the Linksys NSLU2 and Cobalt devices, all required installer modules are automatically installed now and no longer have to be selected manually from a list.
- initramfs will use MODULES=dep rather than MODULES=most. In other words, only modules that are actually needed on your system will be included in the ramdisk.
- /etc/default/rcS will be configured on supported NAS devices to contain FSCKFIX=y, so e2fsck will attempt to repair the filesystem without prompting the user for input. This is useful on NAS devices since they are usually headless.
Finally, the armel port is recommended for new installations now. Debian lenny has two different and incompatible ARM ports: the old ABI port (arm) and the new EABI port (armel). Debian lenny is the last release with support for the arm port and future releases will only support the armel port. It's therefore recommended to use armel for new installations of lenny.