One great thing about this router is its loaded hardware specifications: 400MHz processor, 32MB flash ROM, 64MB RAM and most important of all, a USB port. All these make the router a very versatile little Linux box with tons of capabilities.
However, a confusing thing that inexperienced users may not know, the CPU in the router is MIPS (MIPS in big-endian), while the popular Broadcom routers(such as Linksys WRT54G) are MIPSEL (MIPS in little-endian). I don’t want to go into technical detail here, but just remember, even though both are MIPS, they’re totally different and software compiled for Broadcom routers WILL NOT work on this and other Atheros based devices.
Thanks to the OpenWrt guys, with some effort, we can now use the OpenWRT's optware software installer.
Here we come to another downfall of DD-WRT. OpenWRT will allow you to edit the on-board flash ROM and thus install anything you want directly to your router. DD-WRT doesn't provide this type of access, so we have to install programs to an external USB device. The previous blog poster claims that the USB is faster than the internal flash. This may be true for very high-speed drives, but I'd like to see numbers before also making that claim.
Let's get started & keep in mind that this set of instructions is for DD-WRT ONLY as it is not needed for OpenWRT.
Let's get started & keep in mind that this set of instructions is for DD-WRT ONLY as it is not needed for OpenWRT.
