Slug Upgrade – on Batteries

I’m in a place where we have random power cuts during this time of the year, so didn’t want to risk bricking my slug (NSLU2) during an upgrade and so decided to power it by batteries. My fear was that I might end up bricking the slug if there was a power cut right when flashing it. Later I found out it was unfounded, as according to the upslug2 documentation there is really no way for you frag the RedBoot bootloader unless you intentionally do so, as by default, even if your flash image contains RedBoot and SysConfig sections, it does not overwrite the RedBoot and SysConfig areas (they remain untouched).

Anyway… here are some notes on upgrading a slug while on battery power.

Decided to upgrade my Slug to Debian 5.0 (debian-5.0beta1.zip). Followed the steps here (used the upslug2 method for flashing). It’s handy to have a serial console to see if it’s picking up the DHCP stuff properly. I hooked up the Slug directly to my laptop (running Ubuntu) via crossover cable.

Here are some stats. The Slug upgrade took 2 hrs 50min (on a 266MHz Slug, with a 200Kbps DSL connection, 57MB download). At around 2 hrs you’re prompted to create root and user accounts. About 15 minutes later you’re prompted for additional package selection (I unchecked all). In the next 30 minutes it prepares and flashes the kernel image to the Slugs flash memory. On a Slug (with a 2GB USB flash drive plugged into it), 4 freshly charged AA NiMH 2700mAH batteries (5.6v no load) lasted 3 hrs 10min before it dropped to a 4.3v (no load).