OpenWGT

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Revision as of 13:06, 2 September 2005 by Jeschke (talk | contribs) (Getting scripts, creating toolchain)
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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:

  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. use an OpenWGT firmware image
  2. 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

First of all you need a Linux/UNIX machine with development tools (compilers, etc.) - at least a working subversion tool and debootstrap to create a working set of tools

Get scripts

We published some script to simplify the creating of a toolchain. Get a copy from the SAR subversion repository: 

svn co svn://sarsvn.informatik.hu-berlin.de/openwgt-dev


Note: if your system have all necessary development tools (gcc, zlib, java, wget, ...) installed, you can skip the following section.

Build a toolchain with debootstrap

  • To create the toolchain, you will need debootstrap for it. Debian users run:
apt-get install debootstrap
  • You will find a script called create-image.sh in the fetched openwgt-dev directory. Execute it as root to create a minimal image for user-mode-linux or Xen - if you don't want to use them you can also loop-mount that image locally to use this working set.
  • The image path is /home/uml/ODK-rootfs.img
  • The startuml.sh script (in the openwgt-dev directory) presents, how to run an UML system, using the created image. (Debian supports UML only in unstable tree yet)


Booting OpenWGT

TODO: Description of:

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


Feature list

Feel free to add things you like to have with OpenWGT.

Implemented

  • boot rootfs from USB devices
  • ipkg

TODO

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