One of the things I got for Christmas this year was a Linksys NSLU2. It’s basically a device for attaching USB hard disks to for network attached storage (only accessible via SMB, aka Windows networking). So it’s basically a box with two USB 2.0 ports and a network interface. Not very interesting, eh? Well no, not until you realise that it runs Linux 
It’s actually quite easy to replace Linksys’ version of Linux with one that is accessible via SSH (a distro called OpenSlug) which makes it possible to install extra packages etc., then from there to get Debian (actually OpenDebianSlug) running on it!
So now I have a nice, silent Debian system. For some reason Linksys ship the device with the processor under-clocked, but it just requires a little targetted destruction to get it back to it’s original 266MHz. OK so that isn’t going to break any speed records, but it doesn’t mean that the device isn’t useful – far from it. People are using them for web servers, mail servers, Asterisk PBXs and iTunes servers. Should be fast enough for most simple tasks:
Processor : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 1 (v5b)
BogoMIPS : 263.78
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
CPU implementer : 0×69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant : 0×0
CPU part : 0×41f
CPU revision : 1
Cache type : undefined 5
Cache clean : undefined 5
Cache lockdown : undefined 5
Cache format : Harvard
I size : 32768
I assoc : 32
I line length : 32
I sets : 32
D size : 32768
D assoc : 32
D line length : 32
D sets : 32
Hardware : Linksys NSLU2
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000
So far I’ve installed an NFS server so I can actually use the device for network storage without having to mess with Samba. I’ve also bought a cheap USB webcam so I can experiment with having an Internet-connected webcam, possibly with streaming video. The possible uses for a silent Linux system with USB ports are almost endless…
Really interesting
Also running OpenDebianSlug here (see URL). Any progress with your webcam?
Yep I got it running with one a while ago. I wrote a HOWTO and published it on nslu2-linux.org’s wiki.
comment configurer une webcam en surveillance sur nslu2