Does the tonido plug provide the mini-usb jack on the side like the dev kit does as well as an SD card slot? It would be nice to have the choice of being able to boot off of an SD card since there is only 512mb internal so we can expand stuff on the native FS instead of having to install things on a seperate disk.

Hi,
Unfortunately, Tonido plug doesn't come with the mini-usb jack or the SD card slot.

However you will have a normal usb slot and you can use a USB key or an external harddisk to boot your plug from that. If you are planning to use an external harddisk we would recommend a powered external harddisk. If you have multiple USB devices you can use an USB hub.

Thanks, as long as ssh is still enabled on it to let you install whatever you want on it it should still work well. I was mainly planning on it using it for a media server and maybe a few other server tasks so as long as I can still run other stuff on it Im happy.

Yes, SSH is enabled by default.

Obviously this question is out of the scope of warranty and such, but I was wondering if you had any tips on how to use apt to install to a separate usb disk. Since there is only 512mb internal it would be nice to be able to install extra libraries and stuff for other things to run on the plug and I would hate to run out of space on the internal flash. I had been planning on having a few ntfs drives hooked up and then an 8gb usb flash formatted for ext2/3 to install/run my own apps from.

I had looked at some of the solutions from the sheeva forums and those seem to focus on changing uboot to boot from the usb disk, which I would rather not do and just leave the original system intact.

Running my own source apps would be simple enough but it was more the library dependencies that I was wondering about since those are more specific in their locations for installation.

Moving some packages on a external USB drive will be too risky. If any important library goes onto the USB drive, the the plug might not boot if it tries to load the library before mounting the USB.

Other alternative is that since TonidoPlug is enabled for USB booting, you can put an entire filesystem on a 8GB USB stick and boot your plug completely of your USB stick.

Ok, good to know usb boot support is still enabled, that should make it pretty easy to setup then and still allow me to leave the nand untouched since that was my main concern, didnt want to put the plug in an unusable state.

It would be nice if there was some way to have the option of moving the entire rootfs over to a specified usb device from the tonido admin. Not just for my own preferences, but once there starts being more apps it could start to fill up. Would be nice to have the option in the tonido app to specify a usb device as a boot device and set it up, so that way the tonido can boot off of it and users can leave the original flash as a backup in case something happens.

I also notice that the jukebox database is stored in approot and not in a profile, so it would seem as that gets larger and larger that would also eat up your local flash space.

I know it would probably take alot of effort, but it would be nice to add to the list of possible features in the future.

The feature your are requesting is already possible with the current TonidoPlug. We will post the instructions on how to do that.
But the idea is that you copy the root filesystem and kernel on a ext3 formatted external harddisk. Attach the harddisk to the TonidoPlug and reboot it. Now the plug should boot completely of the harddisk and you have unlimited ( - Kind of )rootfs expansion capability. Once you do this you wont be using the internal NAND at all. This method should work pretty well for your needs.

Hi,

Ready to move the FS to my harddrive. How would I go about it?

Thanks,