Yesterday I was surprised when discovered that,... ehm, well... I'm such a newbie in this... that most routers using MIPS not ARM CPU as I thought before
Since that, I've also tried to look at MIPS in QEMU. There is even less information about this, though debian to help I was surprised I've missed it last time when doing experiments with qemu-system-arm, but now it's very helpful with qemu-system-mips.
I used aurel32's page as a start point: http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/mips/...

WARNING: before downloading any of these binary kernels you should know that there is NO WARRANTY, you are using them AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!
If you are paranoid: yes, I am untrusted source of binary packages, these kernels should only be used for testing purposes, you are adviced not to enable networking for qemu at all.
It is better that you fetch the config and build it yourself using cross-toolkit in your distro.

These binary kernels were tested in Gentoo Linux x86_64...

Today I've finally managed to take some time to RTFM and launch fedora-arm in qemu. Why fedora and not armedslack? Well... For some funny unknown reason neither armedslack 13.1 nor -current kernels won't boot at all(it just halts after "decompessing linux, booting...") while fedora's old 2.6.22 one boots with no problems.
I'm looking forward to learn it a bit further, build a newer kernel for qemu and then re-attempt to boot into armedslack rootfs with it.
Currently looking...

Well, after all that messing about, I've got ARMedslack on a SD card. Again, there was a little hitch with cfdisk, can't remember the actual wording, but it refused to do the partitioning. So I used gparted instead. Haven't decided what I going to use this SheevaPlug for, there's a few possibilities. I was more interested in installing ARMedslack, than any practical use. But I'm sure I'll think of something to do with it. Here's the obligatory screenshot (the white line isn't hiding anything, I...

More detail. One of the problems is the runme.php script in the sheevaplug-installer package. It's the script to be run on Linux, which is meant to restore all the correct environment variables and the Ubuntu to the plug. Why PHP? Why not a bash shell script? The first time I ran it, it just echoed the file's contents to the terminal. That was because it had <? at the beginning, instead of <?php. I knew enough to fix that. But then it came up with two errors: one about the line regarding which...