OpenWGT
Introduction
What is OpenWGT? OpenWGT is a Linux distribution designed to run on Netgear's WGT634U Wireless Media Routers. OpenWGT intents to be compatible to OpenWRT (a distribution for the Linksys WRT54G(S) broadband router).
This OpenWRT compatibility will be reached through compatibility in:
- Init process layout
- NVRAM layout
- ipkg management
- flash partition layout
Advantages
Why don't use the distributed Linux system?
- booting needs lots of time (> 2 minutes)
- it's hard to install own programs
- bad fallback strategy (if modifications fail)
Overview
OpenWGT consists of two parts:
- Linux kernel (2.4 or 2.6)
- Root file system
Installation
WARNING: The installation of OpenWGT is heavily under construction. So we recommend to continue the following steps only if you have a serial console for your Netgear WGT634U.
There are 2 possibilities to install the OpenWGT Linux distribution:
- use an OpenWGT firmware image
- self-compile from sources (using the standarized development environment - WRTSDE)
Install OpenWGT via Netgear's web-frontend
See http://openwgt.informatik.hu-berlin.de/installation.php for details.
Compiling OpenWGT from sources
For self-compilation you will need:
- a toolchain for cross-compiling, since the Netgear WGT634U contains a Mipsel CPU.
- the SAR OpenWGT sources (these are an old snapshot from the OpenWRT project)
- sources of the Linux kernel from netgear
You can also download a complete OpenWGT construction kit from http://sar.informatik.hu-berlin.de/.../
The OpenWGT Develoment Kit (ODK) will be released in 2nd half of August 2005. Stay tuned!
Booting OpenWGT
TODO: Description of:
- boot from flash
- boot via network (TFTP/NFS)
Feature list
Feel free to add thing you like to have with OpenWGT.
Implemented
- boot rootfs from USB devices
- ipkg
TODO
- ipkg packages for kernel modules: NFS, SMB, USB-2-serial(for gpsd), ...
- pppoecd for DSL dialup
- FLASH partition layout
- read network device configuration completly from NVRAM
- working madwifi for linux 2.4