The QNAP TS-109, TS-209 and TS-409 NAS devices were supported by Debian installer until Debian 6.0. They were dropped for 7.0 because the installer initrd would no longer fit in flash. (Debian itself continued to work fine, just without an installer.) Users were told to install with Debian 6.0 and then upgrade to 7.0 and now to 8.0. Recently, Debian 6.0 was removed from the Debian mirrors and I received a number of emails from users. Fortunately, they can use archive.debian.org to install Debian 6.0.
However, this prompted me into getting a TS-109 from eBay. As it turns out, we can support these devices in both stable and unstable thanks to XZ compression and some other minor changes. I commited the changes to debian-installer git master last week and performed a successful installation of stretch. I cherry picked the changes to the jessie branch and also performed a successful installation. I'd like to apply the changes to the jessie branch before 8.3. Is that ok? I think it falls under "hardware support" and has only a small possibility of breaking stuff (I renamed the TS-x1x initrd for consistency.) FWIW, I need: git cherry-pick 065730 # Exclude usb-serial-modules from the armel network-console image git cherry-pick f94738 # Exclude usb-modules explicitly on armel/orion5x network-console git cherry-pick 3966d6 # Drop the file extension from the initrd for QNAP devices git cherry-pick a89d48 # Re-introduce installer images for QNAP TS-x09 git cherry-pick b81fcc # Drop the initrd extension for QNAP jessie does not require 8198180 # Stop including sata and ext2/ext3 modules on the armel/orion5x -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/
