Saturday, July 7, 2012

Pogoplug after a few days

I had this device for several days and so far it works well. I replaced the original Pogoplug software with ArchLinuxArm. The box is much snappier than my original Cobalt Qube 2 with NetBSD 5.2. Of course it is much faster machine and with double the memory. The size of the device is also small and the case while funky looking is OK. I only wish it would open more easily so I could take a look inside.

ArchLinux appears to be well made distribution with the package manager that tracks dependencies. Startup scripts are easy to understand, unlike the latest Ubuntu. I am not sure why they keep changing startup scripts every year. I installed Python and Samba to run MyMedia server and to backup my data from the Windows PC. MyMedia server runs very well on this hardware. The menus come up fast and the videos and images served quickly enough. Over all it is very good box for the purpose.

I am getting another enclosure and will install Linux on the hard drive instead of the USB stick it is on now. I want to try to compile some software and to see how well this box would work for unix development. It probably would not be a speed daemon but it could work.

At this point I would recommend this device to anyone capable of installing Linux himself.

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