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I was impressed with the ease of use with DD-WRT. Grab a binary
and flash the router, then you're off and running with a slick GUI
and all.
That was until I read about the controversial practices
surrounding the DD-WRT project.
As a matter of principle I have opted to use OpenWrt instead.
Ideally, I would install the OpenWrt Kamikaze software along with
X-Wrt as a GUI to access the features. So several questions present
themselves:
1) Does the OpenWrt Kamikaze project support the Netgear WGR614L
router natively? In other words, can I grab the source, compile it
and flash my router without substantial fear of bricking it? The
entry on their WIKI page is confusing regarding support of the
WGR614L.
2) Why would I want to use the "Bleeding Edge" build of
the OpenWrt firmware that is posted on this site, when I could just
grab the source from the OpenWrt site? (The bricking bug issue with
this version is troubling.)
3) Is installation of the X-Wrt software easy and painless or is
this a minefield that I'm about to step into?
4) Is there a clear concise guide on how
to do what I wish to do?
I have Linux experience, so I am not afraid of the command line
and can follow directions properly. It seems like it should be
possible to post some binaries to ease the installation process for
newbies like DD-WRT has done.
I think that in the end, most users expect to spend a minimal amount of time flashing their router, and a maximum amount of time using it. I firmly believe that this process needs to be simplified for OpenWrt to get greater adoption on this hardware platform.
Thanks.
Hi ,
I m not sure abt support of WGR614L in openwrt kamikaze project ....
The bleeding edge environment posted here contains patches needed to support WGR614L and it works fine with WGR614L ....
As far as GUI support is concerned u need to install X-WRT ... but I have seen some people who are already trying this ....
http://www.myopenrouter.com/forum/thread/10720/Trying-to-add-GUI-in-OpenWRT
So don't know how much of pain it is ...
Once u r done with OpenWRT installation u can get instructions for what u want to do from OpenWRT wiki .....
Thanks for the reply.
Do you have any comments about the OpenWrt crash issue?
http://www.myopenrouter.com/forum/thread/10735/OpenWRT-Bleeding-Age-cras...
It looks like this thread was started after the release of the Bleeding Edge build, so it's still a concern.
Also, how did you end up recovering your router?
Yep.... the crash happened only when I tried to add the GUI support and flashed the router with the new f/w ..... with bleeding edge build that is avlbl here I did not face any problem ....
It took me some time to get to the real cause behind the crash and that z why it has been not mentioned in initial posts abt this ....
BTW i tried to recover my board with JTAG and it seems I have damaged the flash and JTAG is not able to recognize it ...
I will wade in here as I am responsible for the Bleeding Edge Environment... I will try and cover the points raised (sorry for briefness, lacking in life time!).
* Unfortunately OpenWRT does not natively support the WGR614L
* The Bleeding Edge Environment was created as a vehicle to carry the patches in the short term; until they are accepted into OpenWRT. Unfortunately attempts to get them accepted have, thus far, failed...
* Building x-wrt is a matter of using the OpenWRT "feeds" mechanism, this can be done on the tree in the above environment! Have a look at scripts/feeds and feeds.conf. (BTW, this means you dont have to do an upgrade on the box using OpenWRT)
* There are two "known" issues with upgading: The fist is the "magic checksum", look at the ngr-flash utility in the above and on this site, and the second is a bug in the flash driver as exercised by jffs2 in openwrt. The former is fixed, the latter is not! Note, you can always build openwrt without jffs2 support.
Hope that helps, again sorry for the non-answers, lacking in time...
ya this is normal ... but if it does not get vmlinuz it would automatically boot from flash ....
Actually WGR614L supports two boot options :
1 . Boot from network
2 . Boot from flash
During boot process it first looks to boot from network and if does not get vmlinuz in this case then it starts booting from flash which contains ur image ..
LEDs blinking means that ur board is OK and has not got bricked .....
I would suggest u to flash it first with official netgear f/w for WGR614v8 avlbl at:
http://www.myopenrouter.com/download/10175/WGR614L-Firmware-v1.1.2_1.0.23/
and then try to flash it with unbroken image .. like the dd-wrt one which u used in ur last post ...
Well .. u probably need to access its console through a serial cable and see what's happening inside ...
May be then we can solve ur issue ...