Installing on Seagate NAS - linux

Question

I recently purchased a 4 TB Seagate central NAS. On a whim, I tried to SSH into the drive just to see what would happen. It worked. I did a little digging and found that it is running montavista.
I thought I would install screen and a few other helpful small programs.
When I try to install screen, it said that there was no C compiler in $path. I suspect that there is likely no C compiler on the drive.
I'm wondering if this is something that I can address and how I would do it. I'm also wondering if there's a way to make it easier to install things on this embedded version of Linux.

Answer 1

If you ssh your Seagate and type
uname -m
You will see that the processor is armv6 or 7 which means that it only will work if you install a Linux distro or programme for this architecture.
I am not that desperate to test installing a raspberry pi distro, but I believe it should work considering that raspberry pi is ARM architecture.
The reason why I think it is not worth at the moment is because I have no replacement for this storage at the moment and I don't want to possibly "brick" it.
Also I see no advantages since a ARM is a basic processor and loading with a full distro is a way to hog the system.
Basic Montavista embed system is enough to do the work I expect from this NAS.
If you want to run something like a Plex server on your NAS forget about ARM processor, look for something more powerful.
Check the limits of my Seagate Central 4TB
uname -a
Linux Seagate-3F0580 2.6.35.13-cavm1.whitney-econa.whitney-econa #1 Wed Sep 16 15:47:59 PDT 2015 armv6l GNU/Linux
free
256 Mb ram
1GB Swap
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 1008M 461M 497M 49% /
/dev/root 1008M 461M 497M 49% /
devtmpfs 125M 125M 0 100% /dev
/dev/sda5 1008M 159M 799M 17% /usr/config
none 125M 125M 0 100% /dev
/dev/sda7 1008M 282M 676M 30% /Update
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /Data
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /shares/Public
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /shares/mauricio
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /shares/mauricio.tm
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /shares/audrey
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /shares/audrey.tm
tmpfs 125M 11M 114M 9% /var/volatile
tmpfs 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 125M 0 125M 0% /media/ram
/dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 3.7T 1.7T 2.0T 46% /Data/anonftp/Public
/dev/sdb1 932G 876G 57G 94% /shares/usb1-1share1
I do have a 1TB usb hard drive attached to this Seagate Central.
You can see that for the root file system it has almost 500Mb used of almost 1GB
So the distro is really small. ( If cross your mind dsl forget it has no arm version of that distro, unless you install it on a pc and build a arm kernel for it... again worthless effort.)
A second partition for the configs /dev/sda5 /usr/config
A third partition for the Update /dev/sda7 /Update
And the shares are LVM partitions.
To install applications you should use the compiler on your Linux computer, compile it for a arm architecture and import to the Seagate via ssh, debug the application on the Seagate and then once it is completely debugged and ready for use install it permanent on the system.
Nobody said it is an easy task :)
https://support.mvista.com/DocViewer/pro_5_1intro.html