Putting a Slug to Work

by Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal, Ryohei Nishimura, and Carlos Ramírez Martínez-Eiroa

We've been busy during the past several months with an emerging multidisciplinary research project focused on environmental science in an urban setting. Given that Chicago is our hometown, matters of air and water quality are near and dear to our hearts (literally), so we hope to bring multiple people and organizations together to better understand them. Toward this goal, we've been exploring several technologies to support mobile and wireless distributed computing, which will play a crucial role in our project. In this installment of Scientific Programming, we're going to talk about our initial foray into embedded Linux running on the slug, which is the pet name for the Linksys NSLU2, a home "appliance" aimed at providing network-attached storage.

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