I have recently installed Debian Lenny to my Western Digital My Book. All
thanks to great guide at Mario
Pascucci's site (big thanks!)
A commented version with some other details can be found at Hacking
WD MyBook World Ed site
The system installed is full-fledged version of testing version (called
lenny) of Debian, so one can use use apt-get to install packages the same way as
at PC (providing you use a packages
mirror, that serves arm architecture). Having successfully installed FTP
(vsftpd), htop, gcc, and others, I also wanted to install Samba (as the most
important part of such a device).
I was fighting with Samba at MyBook for more than two days (and nights). The
problem was that it didn't want to list the shares at the server. The problem in
the end was that there is a bug in Debian
samba package version 3.0.28–1 – current testing (lenny) version, which has
something to do with arm compiler – if you download Samba source code and
compile it yourself without additional parameter -O0, the result will be the
same as with the samba Debian package.
The bug has already been fixed in 3.0.28–2. This version is not in testing
(lenny) yet, but you can manually download the current versions from
To install it do as root:
cd /tmp
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/samba/samba-common_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/samba/samba_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
dpkg --install samba-common_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
dpkg --install samba_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
rm samba-common_3.0.28-2_arm.deb samba_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
Another way is to add sid deb sources to you
/etc/apt/sources.list
I hope that this can make somebody's fight shorter than two days…
