How To Prepare and Build OpenWRT for NETGEAR WGR614L From "Developer's Notes", A Blog by Tathagata Das: MyOpenRouter

How To Prepare and Build OpenWRT for NETGEAR WGR614L

This how-to assumes that you have a North American verison of the WGR614L router, and that you currently possess a serial cable. Click here to learn how to use the serial cable.

Note: I have NOT teseted this using the GUI installation method. Therefore, I can not predict the outcome of installing this via the GUI.

Following are steps for building OpenWRT firmware for the NETGEAR WGR614L.

1. Download the source code from OpenWRT. It is better to download it from trunk rather than from kamikaze.

You can use the following command for download, provided you have access to the internet.

svn co https://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/

2. Once you have the code, you will need to configure it using "make menuconfig" There, please select the following options:

Target System: "Broadcom BCM947xx/953xx [2.4]"
Target Profile: "Generic, Broadcom WiFi (default)"

You can choose other packages depending on your requirements, however, I have chosen the default settings.

3. Download the OpenWRT patches for WGR614L from this link:

http://www.myopenrouter.com/download/file/10568-36

Untar that using this command in a seperate location (like /tmp).

tar -zxvf OpenWRT_patches.gz

It will create two files, patch_bcm947xx and patch_drivers.

4. Put these files into trunk/target/linux/brcm-2.4/patches/

5. Now, compile the source code by using the make command. You will find one trx image into your bin directory. Please convert this image into a .chk image.

6. Burn that image into the board using tftpd. OpenWRT firmware will now be running on the board.

If you have questions, please leave a comment for me here or in the forums!

Read More In: OpenWRT Programming OpenWRT

Discussion: Add a Comment | Comments 1-4 of 4 | Latest Comment

bzing2

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member since: 08/06/2008
rank: 8 of 1525
location: Canterbury, United Kingdom
1 articles authored
8 forum threads started
70 comments

October 28, 2008 11:19 AM

This is great news; I have been looking forward to having OpenWRT running for a while. However its not quite there for me. I would be really greatfull of some help.

European Version

First problem I have is that "This how-to assumes that you have a North American verison", well I don't I have the European version! Which I am beginning to feel is a mistake, as there are lots of assumptions about it being the US version. Now I realise that this means I need to LZMA the kernal image (take from build_dir/linux-brcm-2.4/linux-2.4.35.4). I also used the addchkhdr.c to create an appropriate image; refering to tomato_wgr614l-lzma and WGR614L Firmware Image Creation. I am not 100% sure I have got these steps correct, as you will see.

It doesn't boot

I have managed to tftp upload the image I created above, it doesn't work, here is the output from the serial port!

<pre>WGR614v8 - 1.5 (Fri Jun 6 15:53:24 CST 2008)
et0: Broadcom BCM47xx 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Controller 4.130.30.0
Device eth0: hwaddr 00-1F-33-D1-C9-36, ipaddr 192.168.1.1, mask 255.255.255.0
gateway not set, nameserver not set
Loading .........................
Decompressing..........done</pre>

Help

I am clearly missing somthing, or have not done all the steps correctly. Any help would be appreciated.

bzing2

Member

member since: 08/06/2008
rank: 8 of 1525
location: Canterbury, United Kingdom
1 articles authored
8 forum threads started
70 comments

October 29, 2008 11:29 AM

Update well I have managed to "boot" but via tftp and not via the flash. Here are some steps I have taken in the hope that some one else can spot the flaw!

So first role an image as follows, then upload it with tftp:


mipsel-linux-objcopy -O binary -g vmlinux vmlinux.bin
lzma -fz vmlinux.bin
addchkhdr -i vmlinux.bin.lzma -i root.squashfs -n "U12H072T00_NETGEAR,image.chk"

Now having done that you will find that it doesn't work! However you can still boot OpenWTR. You need to place the ELF version of vmlinux somewhere on the network and gzip it. Then at the CFE prompt do the following:


boot -z -elf -tftp 192.168.1.2:vmlinux.gz

That works for me, I have a working OpenWRT. Now can anyone figure out why it doen't work from the boot loader???????

bzing2

Member

member since: 08/06/2008
rank: 8 of 1525
location: Canterbury, United Kingdom
1 articles authored
8 forum threads started
70 comments

October 30, 2008 12:42 PM

If anyone is interested I have some answers in this posting...

eddie97044

Member

member since: 12/19/2008
rank: 381 of 1525
1 comments

December 19, 2008 11:55 AM updated: December 19, 2008 12:04 PM

Just compiled this code like it said and it works on my Linksys WRT54GS version 7.2 that I modded with an 8MB flash chip so that I could put bigger firmware on it. Works flawlessly so far.

Already had a cfe on the router as I was running dd-wrt, but this looks much more customizable as the rootfs is not mounted read only.

I just renamed the .trx image to .bin and flashed it at the cfe prompt.

Discussion: Add a Comment | Comments 1-4 of 4 | Latest Comment

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