I've been constantly reading and searching information for the past few days, trying to learn how to get Tomato up and running, and I haven't gotten anywhere.
All the information or downloads I find seem to be scattered, outdated or confusing. Please don't get me wrong, I appreciate all the time some seem to put into helping people with all the heaps of information on here. I just don't understand it. To me nothing seems straightforward and up-to-date. It just seems confusing and overwhelming.
Does "(std)" mean standard? If "USB" is not mentioned in the download title, does that mean there is no USB support? What is "(ext)?" I don't need a VPN, should I stay away from anything mentioning VPN?
Here (link) are instructions I read on how to get Tomato firmware running, but the recommended Tomato firmware is a whole year old! I also went to the DD-WRT site, and checked recommended builds for my router and still have no clue which to go for, even after spending countless hours trying to research and seek recommendations.
I was hoping for USB NTFS write support, FTP, Wireless Repeater Bridge support,...
Could anyone recommend current builds for DD-WRT and Tomato for a WNR3500L?
One small example is a contradiction between the documentation here, and the recommended DD-WRT firmware on their site is this:
"DO NOT use a K26 version for WNR3500L."
And when I check the DD-WRT site for a recommended firmware, they're all K26.
Hey Rocky,
I followed your advice, and have gotten DD-WRT up and running. It was very easy once getting the right firmwares. No Tomato yet though.
Thanks a lot for the help, and for answering the other question about which CHK file to download as well!
Edit: Hey, any chance you know if this DD-WRT or the Tomato firmware you recommended has torrent downloading capabilities?
I assume you have to mount a jffs drive to install a torrent client if not, and I only have one USB port I was going to use for storage on my NTFS drive.
On both firmwares, you can install Optware and then install Transmission for example, a torrent client.
I personnally installed Optware on a ext3 formatted partition on my USB drive, following guides like this on Tomato:
http://tomatousb.org/tut:how-to-set-up-nas-optware-etc-for-total-noobs
If you use torrent a swap partition is quite heavily recommanded.
Torrent on jffs is not possible, a limited Optware install is eventually feasable but not recommanded.
I you want to keep your NTFS partition you can resize it using Gparted Live CD.
Hey Striatum,
Thanks for the info. I will definitely read up on that link tomorrow as I'm right about to go to bed, but I was wondering, do you mean create 2 partitions on the hard drive? Like one ext3 for Optware and packages/applications, and one big swap for the downloads?
I have a 2TB HDD with just one big NTFS partition currently. It's all free space right now so I can partition/format it in any way, but I just don't know about this ext3 stuff since I'm used to NTFS always being the filesystem. What is your swap formatted to?
Haha. That's pretty cool; I get a little bit nervous every time I do!
@newwnr--Welcome to the forums. I feel the same excitement when I flash a new firmware. Nervous excitement :)
I think your concerns are totally valid. Even through we try to give everyone an open platform here to discuss the routers/firmwares and also provide as much documentation as possible, it can totally be overwhelming.
I put together a basic guide on which firmware to pick a while ago, but now I'm thinking we could drill down further and explain what some of the denotations mean, e.g., STD vs. USB, and so on. That would be helpful to those who are ready to flash and have the know-how but are new to the Tomato/DD-WRT scene.
I might call on some of the community members to help me out with it too :)
To clarify:
-'swap' is not a partition dedicated to store files. It is like pagefile.sys on Windows systems, a space to move some data present in RAM, when the RAM is full. On Linux/GNU systems swap is always a partition (faster...) and you don't have to bother about format, it is unformatted ;-).
During torrent process, a lot of memory is used, and it's better to have a 100 MBit swap file. (Not on a USB stick, it will be quickly destroyed by all the read/write procedures)
If you harddrive is 'mobile' and should be readable by Windows computers, you must keep the NTFS partition. You must only know that NTFS read/write process is slowler than native Linux formats read/write (like ext3) in Tomato and DD-WRT. So if you harddisk will stay plugged to your router as a NAS, you should consider reformat to ext3, and also creating the SWAP and OPT partitions that can be used in the tuto I mentionned above.
On Windows computers, the most simple is to download GParted Live CD, burn the .iso file on a CD, and reboot your computer on the CD. You'll have a 'live' system (no data written on your computer) that will enable you to create, erase, resize eventually, name (LABEL method, used in the above tuto) many partition file systems. GParted is like Partition Magic but free and more able to deal with Unix/Linux file systems.
See here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
You have also EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition, free (http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm) but I don't remember if it can deal with linux-swap files.