The Slug
So what is the Slug, anyway?
The Slug is a Linksys Network Storage Link NSLU2 device, designed to be a NAS (Network Attached Storage) host to USB hard drives. It is tiny little brick, fanless (which means silent), and very frugal on power requirements.
So why do we care?
Well… unless you’re a geek like me, you probably don’t care. But if you are a geek, you’ll be interested to hear that the Slug is powered by Linux. And it has been open-sourced. And there are several tweaked firmware replacements for it. Mine uses the popular uNSLUng variety. It did indeed used to host a big storage drive, and a static website, and a blog. But those features have now been moved over to the FSG (see the FSG-3 page), leaving the Slug open for my next project… robotics. At the heart of this is the Velleman K8055 interface board (a birthday present), and some code compiled with gcc on the Slug. See the robotics page for more info on that.
