At the LUG barbecue last week, I was talking to Neil W. about getting rid of the dependency on Perl in Debian, specifically for very small systems (his main focus is on embedded devices like phones and PDAs).

I decided to give it a shot on bolan. The biggie is debconf, which is written in Perl. There’s a replacement, cdebconf, but unfortunately it’s even bigger, since it depends on GTK+. Now, GTK+ doesn’t have to depend on X11, it can output to a framebuffer (like recent versions of debian-installer do). However, because of some awkward dependencies, it not only depends on a lot of X11 libraries, but also defoma, the Debian Font Manager. And defoma is written in…Perl.

Unfortunately, as it’s written in C, it’s likely to be a little more difficult to dynamically load the GTK+ stuff…

Last night I upgraded bolan from Debian/arm to Debian/armel. The result: it’s somewhat faster at floating-point stuff (apparently, encoding an mp3 is about ten times faster).

Unfortunately, there’s no Haskell compiler for it yet, so no darcs (according to buildd.net, ghc6 is currently being built, so with luck it should be ready soon).

I used joeyh’s debian-installer build from 25th July, and it worked perfectly (once I remembered that the installer doesn’t support the Slug’s internal network card, and used an external one). I’m constantly impressed by the range of systems and installation methods supported by d-i: most people only ever see the CD install, but it can netboot, boot from USB, install in a chroot from another Debian (or sufficiently similar) system, or—in the case of the slug—be flashed to the internal memory, then overwrite itself with a normal bootloader and whatnot once it’s done.

I’ve just ordered two NSLU2 network-attached storage doodads from Linksys, one for Gem and one for myself. These are dinky little ARM boxen that, with a little tweaking, will run Debian. I’m planning to turn mine into a router (we desperately need a decent one) and network-attached storage; it’s basically silent and uses so little power you can modify it to run off batteries.

Probably going to name it axl, since Axl Rose is a famous musical shortarse.

Update: I ended up calling it ?bolan