Best Alternative Linksys Firmware?

April 6, 2005 1:24 PM

As seen here, there are a fair number of alternative firmwares for the popular Linksys WRT54G line of WiFi access points. I'm curious which ones are considered mature and worth investigating? Obviously Sveasoft's offering, but what else should I be testing?
posted by effugas to Technology (6 answers total)

Best answer: I'm using DD-WRT, which is a fork of Sveasoft, because while I like what Sveasoft has done technically, their tactics make me uncomfortable doing business with them. Everything has worked really well for me, although I'm just using mine at home. Seattle Wireless has done a lot more than that, though, and their wiki has a lot of useful bits.

OpenWRT is a good bet if you want to do your own thing on a small networky Linux-based system rather than have a Linksys router with more features.

wifi-box is reportedly ready to run and is aiming for the same sort of thing Sveasoft has done but completely disconnected from them, but I was hesitant to rely on a product for which the developers hadn't put together a web page yet.

I didn't find much more worth looking at.
posted by mendel at 2:02 PM on April 6, 2005

I like HyperWRT, mostly because it's a very simple modification of the stock firmware, not lots of spooky features. That said, I ended up not really modding my router at all. The default firmware is fine.
posted by Nelson at 2:44 PM on April 6, 2005

I use Sveasoft and have found it to work quite well, I was initially looking for the QoS for my VoIP phone and not any of the fancy WDS type stuff that it can do. I'd say its probably worth the $20 to get almost everything you might need still available through the Web interface. As I understand it OpenWRT and wifi-box are console based linux jobs.
posted by jduckles at 4:07 PM on April 6, 2005

Interesting that you should bring this up, as I just yesterday finally installed the Alchemy version of the Sveasoft firmware. I can't say I'm won over yet, though. No boost in signal strength really, and no increased stability of connections as far as I can tell.

Of course, this might just be my own particular router, but I think it's good that you're sniffing about elsewhere.
posted by yellowcandy at 7:16 PM on April 6, 2005

HyperWRT definitely does what I needed to do (namely WDS to an Apple AirPort Express) and more. Being a fairly simple fork of the default firmware, it's not too scary either.
posted by maniactown at 7:53 PM on April 6, 2005

TheIndividual
posted by jeffmik at 11:04 PM on April 6, 2005