Synology, the taiwanese manufacturer of the best NASes in the world, deliveres its devices with a RTD1619B processor, which is based the in ARM-64 architecture (also known as aarch64). I possess a NAS DS223j, after owning a DS212j for 11 years since 2012.
Being a Python-savyy developer, it is unfortunate that Synology does not ship its NASes with Python support built-in, so I have to download its Python distribution using the Package Center for the Diskstation. THe problem is that it is a old version of Python: 3.8, which was shipped more than 4 years ago. I need to use the most recent features of Python, so it is an handicap had to use and old Python.
The alternative to use the most recent Python (at the time of this article is 3.21), you can use the Python shipped by Anaconda, which provides a package manager compiled statically available for download called micromamba, which you can download by following the instructions at mamba.readthedocs.io.
Here are the steps:
- In a bash shell, execute
curl -Ls https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/linux-aarch64/latest | tar -xvj bin/micromamba - This will download the
micromambabinary into thebinsubfolder - Then, execute
./bin/micromamba shell init -s bash. This will add a initialization snippet into the.bashrcfile. - Then, do a
source ~/.bashrcandmicromamba activate && micromamba config append channels conda-forge - The last command will configure micromamba to download the last releases of a python basic development environment which can started by
micromamba install - Once there, execute the
pythonexecutable and voila, you have a very recent compiled python, perhaps no more than 1 month old ! The basic installation also installspip, so you have all the power of Python on your hands!
References:
- https://avivleemann.github.io/blog/blog/posts/2023-12-07-micromamba/micromamba-guide.html
- https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/micromamba-installation.html#mamba-org-releases
