Having bought an end-of-line v2 (pink) PogoPlug, I ignored all the setup guides (of course !) and reflashed the stock u-Boot image with Jeff Doozan’s version. After the obligatory messing with Linux (both {ArchLinux} and {Debian}) and discovering that the all-singing, all-dancing setups simply don’t work at all for me (the multi-hundred line shell script for debootstrap simply can’t cope with armel as both host and target), I switched to a real OS and had fun with a CF card and Nicole’s Kirkwood FreeBSD pages.
Of course, the first USB2<>SATA enclosure I used would mount but not boot (grr…) and it took a while to figure out how to get the {FreeBSD} 8.2 Kirkwood image onto a bigger than 2GB drive (hint: use an existing {FreeBSD} system and vnconfig), but once I’d used sysinstall on an existing x86 {FreeBSD} system and also discovered the joys of tunefs -L I had a nice shiny 320GB {FreeBSD} 1.2GHZ {ARM} system.
Now for {pkgsrc}: using the 2011Q2 stable tarball, it was still a bit of a PITA as perl kept dying on me with a SIGABRT, but the key for perl is to put CFLAGS+= -fno-stack-protector into the hacks.mk file inside lang/perl5 and then miniperl won’t keep dying.
I’ve not had any luck with mysql55-server at all, but to get mysql55-client to stop sulking you will need to add two symlinks into the lib directory within work/.dist when it complains. After that, the bmake package command runs to completion.
Not yet got a full setup running with enough features to properly thrash the system, but it’s been happily building multiple packages simultaneously with a load over over 4 without any hiccups, and write speed to the USB2 doesn’t appear to be as much of a gating issue as I had worried it might be, so hopefully my websites will be much lower power in a couple of weeks time.