[clug] Best firmware for ASUS WL-500gP?

[David Collett]

Hi,

I have an older wl-500g (similar h/w with slower clock and less ram I
think?) and I use openwrt (www.openwrt.org).
I like openwrt because it is completely from-scratch distro with a
very open and transparent development process. It also has a very
large number of optional packages which can be installed using a
simple apt-like packaging system. You can download a release, or
(quite easily) build your own firmware from source using their build
system.

As this is a broadcom board, the 3rd party firmwares were
traditionally stuck with a 2.4 kernel in order to use the (binary
only) broadcom wireless drivers. This means that you were stuck
without newer 2.6 only drivers (e.g. for newer USB devices). However,
this has changed as of the latest release (OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09 RC1)
which uses the new open-source b43 driver. This driver uses the 2.6
kernels build-in 802.11 stack and supports WPA in both client and AP
modes (using wpa-supplicant and hostapd respectively). I have tested
it briefly and it seems to work very well!

The asus are a great router IMHO, even better now with a completely
OSS software stack!

One thing to be aware of is that although the latest release has a
web-gui which does the basics well, it is probably not as complete or
fancy as some of the other 3rd party firmwares as the GUI is a fairly
low priority for openwrt I think.

Dave



On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 7:48 PM, Carlo Hamalainen
<carlo.hamalainen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Which firmware would you people recommend for an ASUS WL-500gP (version 1)?
>
> DD-WRT looks good, but there are so many others around so I'm looking
> for some human input :)
>
> It would be nice to mount my external USB hard drive (ext3) and be
> able to rsnapshot to it and so on.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Carlo Hamalainen
> http://carlo-hamalainen.net
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