To accommodate a fallback to the original Pogoplug environment in case the USB drive fails to boot, a “switching” approach was made to the bootloader environment variables – that is, at each boot, the variables would be changed between booting the mtd1 kernel and booting a USB drive kernel. The installed mtd3 bootloader can then check for USB drives and boot the Linux kernel from there. In essence, the bootloader environment variables are changed to cause the mtd0 bootloader to chain to another bootloader that gets installed at mtd3. Hacking the DockStar to boot a different Linux system from a USB drive all stemmed from the instructions initially posted at. The remaining partition mtd3 (219 MB) is unused. The second partition mtd1 (4 MB) contains a Linux kernel image, and the third partition mtd2 (32 MB) contains a Linux jffs2 file system. The first partition mtd0 (1 MB) contains a very old U-Boot bootloader. The factory setting has the NAND flash memory set into four partitions. It has 4 USB ports, and unlike other Plug Computers, the ports are powered so you can attach regular USB thumb drives as well as higher-capacity portable drives. The DockStar has 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash memory. I’m okay with Debian though, and Debian provides packages to this “armel” device even in their “squeeze” testing release. I would have wanted something that I could install Ubuntu on, but Ubuntu does not provide support for the ARM v5 architecture. What attracted me to this device was its size, its low price (compared to other Plug Computers), and support for a standard Linux Debian distribution. I bought a Seagate DockStar a couple of months ago.
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