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 by 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:

1. Linux kernel (2.4 or 2.6)
2. 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:

1. self-compile from sources (using the standarized development environment - WRTSDE)
2. use an OpenWGT firmware image

Compiling OpenWGT from sources

For self-compilation you will need:

1. a toolchain for cross-compiling, since the Netgear WGT634U contains a Mipsel CPU.
2. the SAR OpenWGT sources (these are an old snapshot from the OpenWRT project)
3. sources of the Linux kernel from netgear

You can also download a complete OpenWGT construction kit from http://sar.informatik.hu-berlin.de/.../

Booting OpenWGT

TODO: Description of:

• boot from flash
• boot via network (TFTP/NFS)

Feature list

Implemented

• boot rootfs from USB devices
• ipkg

TODO

• FLASH partition layout
• read network device configuration completly from NVRAM
• working madwifi for linux 2.4