Hey David,
first off, you don't need to gain root access to your BA before installing debian. That's completely optional and only required if you want to ssh into seagates linux installation.
When logging in (via putty) to your BA, debian should greet you with something like this:
Linux blackarmor 2.6.22.18 #1 Tue Aug 24 12:51:30 CST 2010 v0.2.5 armv5tejl
It will also automatically present you with an interactive shell called
bash (no busy-box there) that will look something like this (depending on the hostname of your device, mine is "blackarmor"):
To make sure you have debian, you can type these two commands:
blackarmor:~# cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l
blackarmor:~# cat /etc/debian_version
5.0.8
If neither of those are there, your debian fw upgrade didn't work. You should then carefully retry the upgrade process step-by-step. One thing to pay special attention to is that the "firmware image" (custom-sg2000-2000.1337.sp99.img) has to be renamed to sg2000-2000.1337.sp99.img before applying it.
Your BA will definately have the password set to "root" after you installed debian. It's not debian if your old password still works. Of course, once you have debian up and running, you can change the password again.
So, if you managed to get debian up, you can start to profit from it's package management.
The core of debians package management is
dpkg. With that alone, you are basically able to manually install debian packages (.deb files).
blackarmor:~# which dpkg
/usr/bin/dpkg
Front-ends to dpkg are
apt-get and
aptitude (newer). Both can be used to automatically fetch/install/upgrade packages from debian repositories, also taking care of dependencies, conflicts etc. I'm not really sure which one is suggested over the other, but I mainly use aptitude. They have very similar command syntax and work on the same repositories and packages, so they are mostly interchangeable. To tell if they are there, do this:
blackarmor:~# which apt-get
/usr/bin/apt-get
blackarmor:~# which aptitude
/usr/bin/aptitude
Installing the serviio prerequisites (ffmpeg and openjdk-6-jre-headless) is really easy. First, you fetch the latest version informations from the debian repository, then you issue the install command:
blackarmor:~# aptitude update
...
blackarmor:~# aptitude install ffmpeg openjdk-6-jre-headless
It will ask you to confirm installation of those two packages as well as all of their dependencies. Once you confirmed, it will do all the work for you. No need to download any .deb files manually. :)
Debian ships (among others) the text editor
nano which should get you going for simple editing tasks. I prefer vim which is quite powerful, but also way harder to get into when you're a windows victim. :)
Anyways, you simply type
nano /path/to/file/you/want/to/edit and when you're done editing, you press ctrl+x. If you changed the file, it will ask you to save or dismiss your changes.
Getting serviio up basically just requires downloading, unpacking and launching it. You don't even need WinSCP, you can download it directly to your BA using
wget. With the following commands, you create a directory "install" within your home directory, download/unpack serviio into it and finally launch serviio directly on your console.
- Code:
blackarmor:~# cd
blackarmor:~# mkdir install
blackarmor:~# cd install
blackarmor:~/install# wget http://download.serviio.org/releases/serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz
blackarmor:~/install# tar -xzf serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz
blackarmor:~/install# cd serviio-0.5.2
blackarmor:~/install/serviio-0.5.2# bin/serviio.sh
However, this way, serviio blocks your console (you cannot type commands as long as serviio runs - which is forever, unless you press ctrl+c to terminate serviio). Also, as soon as you disconnect/close your putty, serviio will be terminated as well.
To further incorporate serviio into your debian installation, you probably want to move serviio to a more appropriate location, like "/usr/local/serviio" or so. You also want to use an
init-script. That way, setting your BA up to automatically launch serviio on boot is also trivial. But I'll leave that as your homework. :)
Good luck!