openWRT is working on 700 g :-)

[Gregoire.Favre]

Hello,

great new at http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=40786#p40786

:-)

[GerardNL]

Looks interesting. Maybe we can convince our "local" expert KC to give it a try first since he seems to be the most knowledgeable one.

I think there are plenty of people that are willing to test run it. Like me...

[n00ben]

note that kamikaze is in the development branch, and not recommended to install unless you have serial or JTAG access (is this even possible on the wl700?)

[kfurge]

Cool! Though I think I'll let it mature a little more before jumping in.

I've got one more more round of changes left to do to the Asus firmware I've been working on. After that, I might lend a hand to the the effort.

Personally, I'd rather run standard linux on the box and dispense with the Asus firmware for good.

Regarding serial/JTAG access, serial is definitely possible. There's even a how-to.

- K.C.

[johu]

Cool! Though I think I'll let it mature a little more before jumping in.

If you look at patch it's very simple. Only two kernel modules were modified. In aec62xx to enable some pci-tuning (copied from Asus sources) and skip some IDE init (also copied from Asus sources). Second change is in diag module to detect it's running on WL-700gE. This was needed for buttons/leds and to toggle GPIO 3 (controls power to HDD and switch leds). I talked to nbd and he'll look into cleaning up that GPIO 3 hack later, but it works just fine as is.

In userspace netconfig script was patched because it's not using solely model detection done in diag module but has some own detections. I guess OpenWrt devs will fix this as well when they have some time.

Overall I was very surprised how easy it was to get OpenWrt running on WL-700gE. It took several hours from me, but that was mainly because I'm simply no programmer. Well maybe gwbasic 15 years ago, but I'm so confused with Linux cause there's no line numbers on sources!

Regarding post about Kamikaze requiring JTAG (that's not present on WL-700gE AFAIK) it's not exactly true. Since WL-700gE has working recovery mode (EZSETUP button) and adding serial port is piece of cake (after disassembling entire box) there's not much danger.

If you follow instructions I posted to OpenWrt (and linked above) it'll simply work. Probably biggest thing missing is some common framework on OpenWrt to pivot_root various storage devices. Let it be USB stick, USB HDD or internal HDD. Nbd said he has some plans on that as well. Basically idea was that since there's normally large storage device available there's no need for jffs2 partition on flash and files normally put to jffs2 can be put to HDD instead on firstboot. In case of problem simply reboot, press EZSETUP after OpenWrt lights READY-led and it'll boot read-only recovery environment from internal flash.

I think I'll look into OpenWrt initial bootup scripts to see how much changes are required to use HDD instead of jffs2 for writable part of filesystem and then minifoing it to single FS. I was planning some I2C/RTC hacking, but I don't see that much use for them at the moment.

[khorus]

Probably biggest thing missing is some common framework on OpenWrt to pivot_root various storage devices. Let it be USB stick, USB HDD or internal HDD.

An idea on how to implement pivot_root for various storage devices is described here: http://wl500g.info/showpost.php?p=16505&postcount=3

[hal2k1]

Cool! Though I think I'll let it mature a little more before jumping in.

I've got one more more round of changes left to do to the Asus firmware I've been working on. After that, I might lend a hand to the the effort.

Personally, I'd rather run standard linux on the box and dispense with the Asus firmware for good.

Regarding serial/JTAG access, serial is definitely possible. There's even a how-to.

- K.C.

Since I am still having trouble getting everything working satisfactorily with the modified Asus firmware, I too would far rather run standard Linux on the box.

OpenWRT is probably the best option here.

The only thing is, I would like to make sure I had my data backed up before I tried openwrt. I'm sure that openwrt wouldn't use the Asus directories, and I'd imagine a hard disk re-format would be necessary?

[MoD]

Since I am still having trouble getting everything working satisfactorily with the modified Asus firmware, I too would far rather run standard Linux on the box.

OpenWRT is probably the best option here.

The only thing is, I would like to make sure I had my data backed up before I tried openwrt. I'm sure that openwrt wouldn't use the Asus directories, and I'd imagine a hard disk re-format would be necessary?

I installed the openwrt firmware and replaced HDD with another one. I was able to create ext3 file system and mount it.