gentoo on asus wl-500g

cellularmitosis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Dec 2003 Posts: 87

Hi,

I just bought an asus wl-500g (for those of you familiar with the famous linksys routers which you can hack and put linux on, it's the same idea but with usb ports added).

I just wanted to see if there was anyone else interested in getting gentoo running on this neat little box.

I downloaded a uclibc mipsel stage3 from here:

http://mirror.datapipe.net/gentoo/experimental/mips/embedded/stages/stage3-mipsel-uclibc-2005.0.tar.bz2

and have been chrooting into it and fooling around.

I am in the middle of changing the profile and doing an emerge --deep --update world. I'll report back with progress.

Redhatter · Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2005 2:30 am Post subject:

You might want to jump on irc.freenode.net and pester the good people in #gentoo-embedded.

If anything, they'd be the people to talk to about Linux on these devices (which are all based on the same Broadcom SoC).
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Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.

tHe_IkkE · Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 3:12 pm Post subject:

I'm running gentoo on my edimax 6104kp which also has a MIPS32 chip. It works like a charm but compiling is a bit slow (16MB RAM and swap space over USB1.1). But I wanted to prove (Don't know to who...) it could run Gentoo!
Compiling Mysql took me about half a week but it did work!

The wl500g is pretty similar to my kp6104kp, so if you encounter any problems you can always ask me.

Succes running gentoo on your wl500g!

MorpheuS.Ibis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 143

HOWTO anyone? maybe some asus wl500g /wlhdd modified gentoo handbook? i'm very interested in having this device running gentoo but i can't afford wasting one with some wrong setup. thanx

EDIT: maybe just some general hints (eg. how to begin the instalation etc.) will do for now...

pilla · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 7:06 pm Post subject:

I'm interested too... it's too slow to make a rsync by mounting a partition as a SMB share. I want to use it to make rsync'd backups.
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cellularmitosis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Dec 2003 Posts: 87

wow, been a while since I fooled around with this. I seem to remember having started by grabbing a stage tarball from the experimental releases of the mips branch of gentoo (they were based on uclibc I think), and I was chrooting in and rebuilding everything to try and bring it up to the latest gentoo release.

I'll have to take another look at it soon.

pilla · Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2006 9:37 pm Post subject:

Are you using a cross-compiler?
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"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin

casso · Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 8:40 am Post subject: Cross Development + GNAP

I have read some posts about running Gentoo on a WRT: Gentoo on WRT. It was suggested that while it could be done (running Gentoo on one of these machines) it was regarded as being a bad idea, and very experimental. From reading the Gentoo GNAP guides (rather quickly), a GNAP build should run in 32MB of RAM, which my premium version of the 500g has, take up 15MB of space, which is too big for the device, and be able to run on a 486, meaning a 500g should have the processing power to handle it. I gues stripping down a system even more, and using lzma with squashfs could help reduce the size to only 4MB.

I know there haven't been replies to this post in over a year. I just thought I would add my two cents before I attempt to hack away a bit at the OpenWRT buildroot, move across to Gentoo, and apply this to my ASUS WL-500g premium, by using a thumb-drive for FS storage, and utilizing cross development techniques to build the entire system.

I guess the bigger question is, what software should you expect to run on the system? A full blown squid proxy, plus a full apache web server utilizing all the additional modules you can make use of might be way too keen. Dropbear, DNSMasq, a small SMB/NFS file server and appropriate firewalling tools is probably a bit closer to the mark. Excluding the answer "because I can", why Gentoo over OpenWRT? For me, that is the answer, because I can. Better yet, because all my Linux devices use Gentoo, why should my router be different.

I hope to give some more info on my success (or failure) with GNAP and cross development for the mipsel architecture, specifically targeting my router.
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