I came across a cool installation image that will allow you to reflash your Conceptronic CH3SNAS to be able to run a Debian install. I will be doing some experiments with this environment on my local NAS to check out if this is any good and how the performance will be. You can find the configuration steps I took in the entire post.
The image can be found here: http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-armel/current/images/orion5x/network-console/conceptronic/ch3snas/netboot.img
I neglected to take screenshots during the installation but I opted for an advanced install and added support for IPv6 en several small options. I also whiped my old RAID set in the filemanager (another option you can select to be able to manage during the installation). After the installation is complete you possibly want to add WebMin to it for management (I attempted to install and run VNC on the box but it was pretty unstable due to the xwindows environment which is now causing major lag and responsiveness issues).
During the installation I made the above mentioned mistake to install the GUI environment, I think it made my NAS rather unstable so I decided to attempt to remove it. Running a “dpkg –get-connections | gerp x” and some looking around on the Debian.org package information resulted in a long list of packages that could be removed.
apt-get remove x11-apps x11-common x11-session-utils x11-utils x11-xfs-utils x11-xkb-utils x11-xserver-utils xauth xbitmaps xbrlapi xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xdg-utils xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base xfonts-encodings xfonts-mathml xfonts-scalable xfonts-utils xinit xkb-data xorg xorg-docs-core xserver-common xserver-xephyr xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-i128 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xterm
apt-get autoremove
This resulted in a very long list of packages that would be removed and to my suprise several that would be installed again. It seems that this command also automatically took alot of the applications dependant on the GUI environment with it, such as GNOME and the tightvncserver I had installed previously. I ran “apt-get check” to verify everything was still in order. After this WebMin was 20 times faster in responding.