As promised, here's a more in-depth look at what OpenPogo is, how it works, and what it does to your Pogoplug. First off, let's start out with the Pogoplug itself. The Pogoplug runs on a slightly-modified SheevaPlug development board. It has a 1.2GHz ARM processor and 256MB RAM, along with 512MB of flash-based storage space. It might not sound like a lot, but hey, this thing won't run anything except maybe 3-4 services outside of the Linux ones out-of-box.

When you plug it in, the Pogoplug boots a small Linux distro, grabs an IP address via DHCP and then runs Cloud Engine's Pogoplug-connector (HBplug). Connected USB drives are mounted just as a regular Linux box would do it - except to /tmp/.cemnt instead of to /media or /mnt. It also starts telnet and Dropbear for SSH. All of this happens in about 20 seconds in the bootup.

The underpinnings of this are obviously Linux - so, if you're a Linux user, you're going to want to take a peek. If you SSH in, you'll see a standard directory structure, but in read-only. I'm guessing this is for some added security to keep users from bricking their Pogoplugs. It can easily be mounted read-write though. The 512MB flash storage space is partitioned though, / is small, about 30MB, and the rest isn't mounted. I mount it to /opt, since that's where packages will be installed later. You don't need to format it or anything - it's ready to go.

So, how do you add functionality to a Linux box? You can compile and make install things or use a package manager, except the Pogoplug has neither GCC nor a package manager. So, the first thing OpenPogo does is mount that 450MB /opt partition and installs a pre-configured package manager, ipkg. IPKG is basically an Optware-enchanced version of the popular apt-get - the packages (with extension .ipk) are, from my experience, the exact same thing as .deb files - created the same way. The repository is managed the same way as well.

OpenPogo also modifies the Pogoplug startup files and terminal configuration a bit, in order for your packages to work on boot without any mounting and for them to work connected via SSH.

Once you have the OpenPogo base package installed, you can use ipkg just as you would use apt-get - install packages, remove, update, and upgrade. You can install basically anything you would on a regular Linux box - a list of packages is at http://openpogo.com/repo/ and you can get started with OpenPogo at http://openpogo.com. />
Cloud Engines has even gone a step further and extended their warranty to include usage of OpenPogo's base installation and the guides - but nothing else - so be careful and type carefully. That's just about the only problem with the Pogoplug I have - it doesn't have an easy way to restore the system incase it does get bricked, but I'm going to try building the serial cable soon ;)

Have fun with your new Linux box, and throw out that 10-year-old 300-watt clunker you've saved for sharing your home's files and music and use the Pogoplug, which takes about 5 watts an hour (plus attached HD) - 5 watts for 24 hours is 120 watts - the Pogoplug uses less in a day than half of what that old box would take in an hour! Think of the energy savings!

Read More In: PogoPlug Development