WRT54G Successor Falls Flat On Promises 113
New submitter JImbob0i0 writes: "Back in January, Linksys/Belkin made a big deal about their new router, the WRT1900AC, which they claimed was a successor to the venerable WRT54G, and how they were working with OpenWRT. They released it this week, but their promises have fallen far short. You need to apply patches (which don't apply cleanly) and compile yourself in order to get it to work... so long as you don't need wireless support. There has not been much response from Linksys on the mailing list to criticism of the improperly formatted patch dump and poor reviews as a result."
Hey Soulskill! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Hey Soulskill -- JImbob0i0 may be a new submitter, but you're not a new editor. How about editing the content of the submission so that it actually makes sense?
What exactly is it they pay you to do? I'm sure I could write a shell script that would randomly select a few stories every day to copy to the front page.
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I thought Soulskill was a shell script. :)
Aren't stories automatically selected by upvoting on firehose?
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$409.99 WHAT THE FUCK (Score:5, Informative)
they clearly missed the ball on there about what made the previous model useful.
I mean, for 400 bucks you could pick up two minnowboards.
or like, 7 raspberry pi's with wifi.
or like, 10 normal home wifi routers.
400 bucks why bother with their gpl dancing around. you can buy a frigging dualcore laptop for that money and enjoy out of the box webcam hosting, ethernet + wifi routing with a built in high resolution display and built in ups!
Re:$409.99 WHAT THE FUCK (Score:5, Informative)
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The TP-Link I got was less than 50 euros.
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Netgear wndr3700 goes for about the same. Specs are a bit lower than this new linksys (it's a couple of years old now) but plenty for most applications and with excellent openwrt support (just make sure you buy the right hardware revision).
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That's all fine and dandy until your WNDR3700 starts rebooting on you every 15-30 minutes, like mine did. It worked great, right up until it went out of warranty. I have tried upgrading/downgrading stock FW as well as DD-WRT (the latter of which will break your 5GHz WiFi band). Unfortunately, I have V3 hardware (Broadcom chip, as opposed to Atheros).
So yes, I agree to make sure you buy the right hardware revision. However, my experience with all Netgear routers I've tried (4 different ones, over the year
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Neah, it was the: http://www.newegg.com/Product/... [newegg.com]
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Picture seems to suggest half of that. Four ports (+ external) and one estata.
Shachar
Re:$409.99 WHAT THE FUCK (Score:5, Interesting)
Just get a Buffalo. Good OpenWRT/DD-WRT support (some come pre-installed with DD-WRT), good price, good hardware. Linksys have been shit since the late 90s when I first encountered them, and the WRT54G was never that great to begin with (how many hardware revisions were there?)
Re:$409.99 WHAT THE FUCK (Score:5, Informative)
Just get a Buffalo. Good OpenWRT/DD-WRT support (some come pre-installed with DD-WRT), good price, good hardware. Linksys have been shit since the late 90s when I first encountered them, and the WRT54G was never that great to begin with (how many hardware revisions were there?)
The current Buffalo routers have TERRIBLE WiFi. I mean absolute garbage. I bought a Buffalo router and am using it as my firewall and LAN router. I bought an Airport Extreme to actually provide WiFi service to my home. With the Buffalo I had to reboot the device every 4-6 hours minimum just to use the WiFi. I could not copy a 5GB file over WiFi as that was guaranteed to screw the router up and WiFi would stop working all together. The Airport is expensive as hell but I haven't had to touch the thing in 3 years. I would use that as my only device if only it let me configure things like dynamic DNS support, etc.
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Parent specifically mentioned "Curent" Buffalo routers.
Re:$409.99 WHAT THE FUCK (Score:5, Informative)
Commodity networking for anything more complicated than a switch has been garbage for years. To keep the price down, the manufacturers are brutal about reducing CPU specs and speed, then pushing them to their absolute limit so they're constantly in danger of overheating. They cut the RAM to the minimum as well. They also spend as little as possible developing and debugging the firmware.
And they lie. They like to try to sneak changes past the public by keeping the model numbers the same while totally changing the innards. They will change only the "revision" number, as if the total redesign was only a minor change, and not print this on the box. I once bought the famous Linksys WRT54G, and found it was junk. Couldn't even ping reliably through a wired connection, never mind wireless. My old router (a Netgear RP114, no wireless capability) worked fine, so it was definitely not anything else. I found out why. When I bought it, Linksys had just moved from revision 4 to revision 5. Revision 4 was the good one, with Linux. Revision 5 had half the RAM and was running a very buggy firmware on VxWorks.
Just a guess, but from my own experiences, maybe as many as 1/3 of the routers out there are so poorly made that they never work properly or well, or if they do, they don't last long, dying from overheating in the first year. Including that Linksys WRT54G revision 5, I've taken many a router back within the first 3 days because they just did not work, even after updating them with the latest firmware offered on the vendor's website. Of the ones that do work, sometimes have had to work hard to make configuration changes through their web interface. The web pages sometimes do not load properly because the router suffered a brief instant of overheating, perhaps, or because of a bug, hard to say. The Trendware routers I've seen have particularly bad interfaces that make Metro look nice by comparison. I could put up with that, if they at least worked well, but no. The latest piece of junk I'm having to deal with is an Arris DG860, supplied by Time Warner, which figures. It will drop wireless connections for no apparent reason, and may start working again a moment later, or may need to be reset by power cycling it.
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It's 2014 why is it so hard to have a wireless router that needs a reboot every couple of days that can't just fucking reboot itself?
Its 2014 why does it still need to reboot every few day damn it.
The fucker shouldn't be unstable. Especially when I can build one for less money with a raspberry pi and a a usb wifi dongle for what $50
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Strange, I have a Buffalo WZR-D1800H (a current model) and the wifi is excellent. Far better than my old Asus N16 and the crap that my ISP gave me (Virgin Superhub 2). 5GHz in particular is damn fast, which is the main reason I got it was 2.4GHz has become unusable around here.
Maybe you had a duff one? The only time I used an Airport Extreme was when I was at a friends house and it was crap, but that could have been for any number of reasons unrelated to the Airport itself.
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Strange, I have a Buffalo WZR-D1800H (a current model) and the wifi is excellent. Far better than my old Asus N16 and the crap that my ISP gave me (Virgin Superhub 2). 5GHz in particular is damn fast, which is the main reason I got it was 2.4GHz has become unusable around here.
Maybe you had a duff one? The only time I used an Airport Extreme was when I was at a friends house and it was crap, but that could have been for any number of reasons unrelated to the Airport itself.
Could be the model? I have three WZR-HP-G300NH2's and all I use them for is firewall/router. They're relatively inexpensive (I believe I paid $70 a piece for them), but they were unreliable. The WiFi would stop working (though the SSID would still broadcast, no traffic would go anywhere). The older they got, the worse the problem seemed to be. I still use them to handle firewall, but that's it.
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I have a couple of that era but not that specific model, and some older 802.11g models as well. No issues with any of them. I really think you were just unlucky as most people seem to think they are good. They have a good reputation in Japan where they are pretty much the only brand that can reliably route close to people's theoretical broadband speeds (back in the day it was 100/100Mbps, but these days it's 1000/1000 and Buffalo benchmark around 950-970Mbps in their high end models.)
You can get a Cisco 860VAE for the $ (Score:2)
Which is an interesting discussion in itself, Ubiquity sme stuff is also a lot cheaper
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That's what I did, Ubiquiti wirelesss N AP and edgelite router. Total cost 170 bucks, rock solid.
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Fuck Linksys, plenty of open source supported devices with newer features, asus comes to mind, i'm sure there are others.
openWRT runs, without wireless (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with Andrew Johnson [openwrt.org]. Almost everyone will want a wireless router. A Linux, open-source, router was the segment that the WRT54GL filled.
It's a bit of a shame. I need a bunch of new routers with wireless support and ideally cellular support too.
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just buy a switch and a laptop.
it's cheaper than this crap.
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Also: much more capable.
It's amazing how things like NAS-devices and routers have become so much more expensive that just buying similar parts and putting them together gives you 100 times the specs and a million times the flexibility for the same price.
The only thing these devices have going for them is low power usage vs capabilities and even on that front they are bested by pretty much any budget mobile phone there is.
It's ridiculous.
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or a Mikrotik
Re:openWRT runs, without wireless (Score:5, Informative)
What you need to do is to look at the available routers, and find which ones have supported chipsets and adequate flash storage and stuff.
In the 802.11n dual-band generation, the best seemed to be the Atheros AR7161 routers, such as the Netgear WNDR3800. [newegg.com] I bought that specifically because it has robust open-source drivers for both radios, so it works smoothly with OpenWRT. It's not the fanciest, but I used 802.11g for years without problem, so it can't be that bad.
For the 802.11ac generation, I'd guess that devices with version 2 of the Qualcomm Atheros QCA-9880 might work best, such as version 2.0 of the TP-Link Archer C7, [openwrt.org] but I haven't been following it since I don't need an upgrade, yet.
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The last time I bought a dedicated device like this, I got a PC Engines [pcengines.ch] WRAP, which is similar to the boards that Soekris [soekris.com] sells. For about £100, I got a 266MHz AMD Geode (x86) CPU, a board that could boot from a CF card, and had 3 wired sockets and 2 miniPCI slots (with an 802.11g card in one), a metal case and a couple of antennae. That was quite a few (actually, almost ten) years ago.
The first search result has a similar kit [linitx.com] for £139, which is a bit more, but if you shop around you can pr
C7v2 (Score:1)
I provided the board support patch for Archer C7v2 in OpenWRT. There have now been nightly builds for it for several days, and the units are pretty much working at 100%.
I had some difficulty in actually *acquiring* a C7v2, but TP-Link is truly a pleasure to deal with. Newegg, on the other hand... I bought a C7v2 from them, they sent me a C7v1. I RMA'd it and they sent me ANOTHER C7v1, and had the audacity to claim that the hardware was identical and I should just install the "v2 update" from tplink's site.
Re:openWRT runs, without wireless (Score:4, Informative)
From a few posts along in the thread https://lists.openwrt.org/pipe... [openwrt.org]:
The link to the firmware appears to be here http://support.linksys.com/en-... [linksys.com], it's one of those annoying javascript-non-hyperlinks.
Can anyone more au fait with OpenWRT verify that this is correct?
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My old WRT54GL still works well. I don't need the newer fancy models until mine dies. :)
Firmware (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Linksys' OpenWRT router ships without OpenWRT firmware, apparently because there is no such firmware. You could compile such a firmware yourself, if not for Linksys withholding the wireless drivers.
I can't even begin to imagine a chain of events that resulted in shipping an OpenWRT router without any OpenWRT support.
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Chain of events is as follows:
1. Company opens mouth.
2. Lies ahem I mean marketing falls out.
3. ?????
4. Profit!!!
You forgot the most important parts!
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It starts with "B" and rhymes with Whelkin.
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pre belkin linksys was kinda shit for this too. If you wanted wifi to work on a WRT54, you had to run 2.4 past it's due date, as there was no 2.6 driver, and the 2.4 one was a blob. Someone must have eventually reverse engineered the broadcom junk, as there was 2.6 support, much later. Well... that bit falls under the broadcom is evil category, I guess.
Though I suppose it wasn't marketed as an 'OpenWRT router', was it...
A lot of the router outfits (or just embedded things in general) seem pretty poor in com
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Chain of events:
1. Product manager gives a feature list and a hard delivery date based on arbitrary whims of an executive
2. Development and QA comes back with a date that requires a schedule which is 3x longer
3. Product management comes back with the same date and decides to handle the issue by bringing in more contractors insisting that throwing more people at the problem will achieve the goals and the megalomaniac rockstar contractor said "Oh I can get this done in half the time."
4. Reality proves the pro
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Linksys has working wireless drivers; the product ships with them. The only problem is the lawyers who won't open source those drivers.
It would take them a few seconds to just post the sources that the router ships with to their web site; there is no *technical* reason for the delay, they are just refusing to do so, even after promising that they would.
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It sounds like they have released some driver sourcecode - but it is hacky, and not useable by Open WRT
From the mailing list:
There are also still some pieces missing: Since this driver does not use
standard Linux Wireless APIs, it can only properly function with custom
hostapd/wpa_supplicant hacks. I don't see those in the release.
Unfortunate.... (Score:1)
Netgear has an R7000 model which works fine with OpenWRT. I'm not sure of the accuracy of the following: But I think ASUS has one too.
Seems like a major failure on Lynksys/Belkin's part. But neither of those companies really impress me.Sure I used WRT54Gs in multiple applications and have a few laying around. But it's not like those things were actually *great*. They were good enough and hung around far too long for my taste.
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> But I think ASUS has one too.
Asus RT-N66U ? (I specifically bought this model based on it's TomatoUSB support)
Give it more than one day, or even week (Score:4, Interesting)
Early adopters to something ambitious should expect a hiccup every now and again.
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That however sounds like a bit of a fatal roadblock.
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Early adopters and beta testers are not the same thing. If I bought something of the shelf new and it didn't 100% meet my expectations then it deserves a crap review. If the problem is then fixed later it deserves an even worse review for being rushed to market before completion. We as consumers need to stop accepting half finished crap that companies are rolling out with promises of patches later, often which never come.
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Sadly that is the reality now, and in this case the problems are in something that comes as an extra instead of the core function of the device so it's excusable.
I've even had to patch a DSLR camera to get a lens to work.
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If the lens was released before the camera than that's equally inexcusable. If it was released after then I don't see a problem. In this case however the product had an advertised feature that didn't work. Now if none of your lenses autofocused would you be upset? I mean the camera still takes photos right?
What is reality or not isn't the issue. It's what we accept that is the issue. The current trends can be summed up with EA evil, DRM bad, oooh new game shuddup and take my money!!!
And as the companies poc
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It failed to start up while the lens was connected, so no.
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Oh wow lol.
Nothing has changed (Score:5, Informative)
I work for a company which installs and deploys home / business networks for home automation purposes, and EVERY Linksys device we have tested, has inevitably ended up in the bin, not because they were faulty, but because they turned out to be rubbish.
Linksys has a long history of producing unstable devices, and their original WRT54GL Linux router's only redeeming feature was that it was open source. The interface was terrible, and so was the firmware. In fact, we aren't only talking routers, because we noticed that some of Linksys's cheap gigabit switches had issues with stuttering when playing media (no other switches were affected by this issue, including 10/100 cisco ones). It's particularly pathetic given that Blu-ray requires only 54mbps to stream.
Even assuming that patches are supplied which fixes the issues with this router, unless Linksys seriously has seriously improved their development team, and their hardware, you would be far better off with a cheap TP-Link which acts solely as a router/ADSL modem, a switch which manages the network traffic (NOT A LINKSYS ONE), and Unifi's for your Wifi (those are a dream to roll out in bulk, and the new Unifi software if it comes will even support Seamless wireless WITHOUT an expensive hardware controller).
Further evidence, we didn't even want to risk selling our used Linksys equipment on eBay and damage our seller rating (it was worth the write-off)..
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I work for a company which installs and deploys home / business networks for home automation purposes, and EVERY Linksys device we have tested, has inevitably ended up in the bin, not because they were faulty, but because they turned out to be rubbish.
To be fair, this is true of pretty much *all* consumer grade routers running the vendor's stock firmware.
Lets see, a few anecdotes from my own list of hardware:
- Dlink router that decides legitimate traffic is some kind of an attack and blocks it, even when the firewall is disabled.
- Netgear router that hangs when receiving certain well formed UPNP packets, even when UPNP is disabled. Also provides no information about the PPP link status, beyond "online" or "offline" so good luck trying to
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Out of curiosity, have you found issues with the Wireless, multiple networks (ie, guest networks) and the Billion 7800NXL's? The only reason I ask, is because Billion is denying an issue with both of these things, but, we seem to be able to easily replicate issues..
Status update on the wireless driver source code (Score:1)
Open mouth, insert foot (Score:2)
I used to be a real fan of WRT54GL and happily ran Tomato on it for a long time, until I realized I needed gigabit ethernet (yes, I do need it) and Wireless N (yes I use it). The new router had to actually work, without crashing, and handle constant data load, and not need hand-holding.
Linksys had the E3000 which worked fine except the CPU was wimpy and the 5GHz never worked for me. Throughput was awful. So I went to closed-source hardware, specifically an Asus router, and it works just great. No p
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So I went to closed-source hardware, specifically an Asus router, and it works just great. No problems. Lots of bells and whistles and enough horsepower to cope with actually doing what the buzzwords on the box say it can do, without crapping out. This thing is a beast. Never needs nursing. It just works.
Uh, I chose an 802.11ac Asus router for the hardware, too. However, I would not characterize it as "never needing nursing" [arstechnica.com].
The closed source firmware sucks, apparently has a development team that can't comprehend basoc security, and the QoS system it has sends throughput down to telegraph-operator speeds. I would love to load OpenWRT on it, but I will settle for DD-WRT.
I would give the router four stars if it cost $45, but it cost ~$200.
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I went to a multi-band AC router because I have devices in my house that it just doesn't make sense to run a wire to. My basement was finished before I bought the house (new in 09, owner fully finished it) and the ceiling is all drywall.
Yeah, I can poke holes and run cabling just fine. However, it was just easier for me to spend some $$$ and now I can throw files back and forth from anywhere in the house at better than 802.11g speeds; typically half of gigabit wireline speeds. My internet isn't fast enou
Sounds like a WRT54G Successor to Me (Score:2)
A (?possibly?) decent router with such bad firmware you will be forced to go to extraordinary lengths to fix it.
WRT160nL (Score:1)
$50 (Score:2)
https://www.asus.com/us/Networ... [asus.com]
I bought one of the previous models of these kinds of things from Asus and love the crap out of it. OpenWRT and all!
Linksys lost me long ago.. (Score:1)
Go pick up an Asus RT-AC68U or RT-AC66U both support DD-WRT and from what I can tell from mine they work flawless*
New they are a bit pricy but you can pickup refurbished for a reasonable price on newegg
* So far so good...
Asus Black Knight Routers (Score:2)
I would highly suggest Asus routers as a good alternative. Their native firmware is a customized verison of OpenWRT and they can be setup to run a version of Tomato firmware if you can't be bothered with the complexity. I own an RT-N66U myself and highly recommend it and it's successors. They even have a microSD slot inside for no apparent reason other than for hacking.
There's no source for what? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenWRT developer Felix Fietkau has something different to say [openwrt.org]:
"Quick update on this subject: Linksys has now posted a GPL source for the WRT1900AC, and it contains the wifi driver sources. It appears to me, that this driver was properly licensed under GPL, with proper license headers in all source files."
Of course, this is Linksys code so...
As I anticipated, the code quality of the driver source code is abysmal. This looks like rewrite (not cleanup) material, ugly enough to cause eye cancer or frighten small children ;)
The issue here isn't that there is no wireless support, just that it's of codethulhu quality.
related: DD-WRT (Score:2)
I've got that on my router. Let me start by saying this is *NOT* the poster child for F/OSS. In fact, if you aren't seriously into hardware, or systems administration, DON'T! Never in my decades of professional work have I ever seen a project where people would talk about their "favorite builds"... in fact, I'd never *ever* thought of putting those two words together.
I wanted one thing besides gigabit routing: the ASUS I have says it can serve as a prntserver for USB printers. Call ASUS, "oh, not that print
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That's DD-WRT. OpenWRT is a fork (I forget which came first).
Different projects.
I didn't know Belkin bought Linksys (Score:1)
No wonder they suck now. Did they figure out how to fix/avoid that firmware bug that opens up NAS devices attached to most of their routers to the public yet? Or are they still going with "don't set remote admin to on"?
Too bad, or is it. (Score:2)
I was recently looking to get a new router to replace my old D-Link DWL-2100AP & DI-604 combo and I saw that WRT1900AC and wished it was available.
I ended up getting a refurbed D-Link DIR-651 for $12.
The WRT1900AC is on $250 on the Linksys store site. And PCWorld [pcworld.com] gives it a pretty decent review, with caveats, and out of the box firmware.
$400? Woah. (Score:1)
why bother with consumer router? (Score:1)
they're all crap, both in hw and sw. Yes, you can install dd-wrt ét al, but it's still generally crap hardware you're installing it on, and the firmware is only valid for certain hardware.
I bought a Fit-PC 1.0 second hand for 500SEK ($76) and installed pfSense on it which is not hardware specific. Best router i've ever had. I have to use another device for wireless, but there I just re-used my old Linksys WRT610nv2 wireless router as a simple access point. You can get wireless-N access points prett
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Re:OMFG compile! (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy crap you have to actually compile it yourself! What is the world coming to? You mean hacking isn’t just plugging stuff together?
OK the thing has problems, that’s news. But if compiling is considered hard, well, it’s hard to see you as a nerd.
RTFA. The patches are a mess, don't compile cleanly and the wireless driver is missing. Rendering it an expensive paperweight.
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RTFA. The patches are a mess,
Yeah, not seeing this one as a problem; Open Source projects have no problem supporting hardware that the manufacturer would rather they didn't support, often over the manufacturers objections, but when it comes to hardware specifically built on behalf of the Open Source project, all of the sudden it's now the companies job, rather than the Open Source project's job, to pee on the patches until they smell like the projects leaders peed on them, so that there are no changes required to be able to use them.
Th
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yeah so linksys developed the chips and stuff? yeah right(1).
(2) other manufacturers buy from the same chip manufacturers and get the same cookie cutter drivers under the same cookie cutter nda.
3,4,5 doesn't stop others from doing so.
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yeah so linksys developed the chips and stuff? yeah right(1).
(2) other manufacturers buy from the same chip manufacturers and get the same cookie cutter drivers under the same cookie cutter nda.
3,4,5 doesn't stop others from doing so.
Making the driver proprietary and licensed only for use with the OpenWRT hardware most certainly does prevent 3,4,5 from being leveraged by another vendor. If all I have to do is copy your commodity chip choices and a lot of your interconnect design, you have R&D costs to recover, and I don't = I put you out of business, unless you have brand loyalty above and beyond the price point.
Can you say, with a straight face, that another product that could run the exact same software load and work the exact sa
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let me sell you this new car that you first need to design yourself, then you print it in a 3D printer and then you can finally build it.
It's 100% hacker friendly.
Re:OMFG compile! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because often times compiling things like this, especially what is essentially an entire fucking Linux distribution, and ESPECIALLY AGAIN one that requires cross compiling this, is rather a pain in the ass. Unless somebody has pre-built the toolchain for you, preconfigured it, etc, you're looking at at least 45 minutes of work, not counting the time for the compiler to do its actual work. That's also working under the assumption that you know how to operate the compiler (I'm assuming GCC) fairly well.
I don't know about you, but in spite of using Linux for over 10 years, unless an application I've downloaded in source form already has the build scripts configured, I'll never get the damn thing to compile. (Well, in cases where it's a single .c file with few dependencies it's not a huge deal, but even then cross compiling requires yet more work.)
Configuring make scripts and all of that crap are just not my thing. I've never been into programming anything beyond interpreted languages to be honest. Stuff like writing Bash scripts is easy for me, but I don't like to mess with C mainly because when compilers throw errors I often don't know jack shit about how to solve them, and asking for help on them usually results in me getting trolled or somebody pointing me to one of those god awful man pages.
Re:OMFG compile! (Score:4, Insightful)
You know the man pages are the manual right?
How about you bother to learn something instead of coasting on the work of others for a decade then complaining things don't fulfil your every need after you've contributed exactly bugger all.
As someone who has worked on a Linux-based embedded system, and had to cross-compile to do it... dude, Linux cross-compilation sucks, and there's almost universal pushback from everyone wo deals with Linux build systems, from Debian to Red Hat, and beyond, to any attempts to make it better.
IMO, you should be able to download and install OpenFriggingSolaris on a SPARC system, and cross-compile Linux for ARM, Alpha, and Intel on the damn thing, without having to have some dumb-ass chroot environment because someone is too stupid to deal with include paths, library paths, and source paths correctly, and because the build process somehow thinks it's an OK thing to use build products created during the build process as part of subsequent build steps. I mean, how incredibly, obviously stupid is it to use intermediate build products as part of your build process, unless they are targeted solely at your host environment, and never mirrored into your target build product area (oh yea, a working "DESTDIR=" would be kinda helpful here, too...).
The whole idea that you can have dependencies that reference files in the host environment other than those on a mounted read-only source partition, and that "retry" package builds each time because the build system is too stupid to figure out missing dependencies is terrifically annoying.
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As someone who has worked on a Linux-based embedded system, and had to cross-compile to do it... dude, Linux cross-compilation sucks, and there's almost universal pushback from everyone wo deals with Linux build systems, from Debian to Red Hat, and beyond, to any attempts to make it better.
Did you try OpenEmbedded / the Yocto Project? It takes away pretty much all of the pain of cross-compilation. Most of our users seem pretty happy with it.
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As someone who has worked on a Linux-based embedded system, and had to cross-compile to do it... dude, Linux cross-compilation sucks, and there's almost universal pushback from everyone wo deals with Linux build systems, from Debian to Red Hat, and beyond, to any attempts to make it better.
Did you try OpenEmbedded / the Yocto Project? It takes away pretty much all of the pain of cross-compilation. Most of our users seem pretty happy with it.
Yocto has a different goal than cross-building a standard Linux distribution, along with some components. I was specifically involved in ChromeOS, and the cross-build wasn't there fore something as large as a complete Debian distribution.
I think the big problem with Yocto and OpenEmbedded (or ChromeOS) is that it assumes a Linux host environment, and acess through the host environment to package management tools.
I admit that there was a lot of intrinsic bias because of the team's history towards a Debian-b
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You know the man pages are the manual right?
How about you bother to learn something instead of coasting on the work of others for a decade then complaining things don't fulfil your every need after you've contributed exactly bugger all.
I assume you synthesise your own medicines, right?
And build your own car.
No, I expect you're just coasting along on the hard work of others. Next time you take any medication remember that you're contributing nothing but reaping all the benefit.
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Well, here's the main thing: I mostly don't have time to trudge through those man pages. The man pages frequently don't show example usage, which in many cases means you have to guess their syntax. Maybe not so bad if you code on a regular basis, but I don't.
I actually would love to be able to code in C, but every time I try to get around to it, one of the common things I'm told is that if you don't know C at this point already, then you really shouldn't bother with it, because there won't ever be any jobs
Re:OMFG compile! (Score:5, Informative)
So basically they are saying since the firmware they are providing will compile (even though it doesn't contain any wireless support) is still a firmware so they are technically holding up on their end of the bargain. This is just really obtuse.
So nerd or not there is no amount of compiling that will actually make this WIFI router actually connect any WIFI devices.
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Compiling can be very hard if the patches don't apply cleanly.
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