This is an old revision of the document!
I originally used buildroot with the latest 2.4 kernel, busybox, and uClibc.. but I'm moving toward using OpenWRT's releases. A good start, is downloading this:
http://wrt.scottn.us/OpenWrt-SDK-brcm-2.4-for-Linux-i686.tar.bz2
If you don't already have Linux, don't emulate, but cooperate! CoLinux runs as a process within Windows. No CPU emulation is needed and therefore it should be the fastest yet. I recommend their Debian 5.0 image as a good starting point.
I will soon post patches, etc… but I feel a re-do coming on. I will re-checkout OpenWRT at the 10.03 release and integrate into there. Thus, the whole process will be as simple as “make menuconfig” and “make” … I hope.
Currently, I used buildroot, selected options I thought were good for MIPS32/mipsel, built the root filesystem and manually tuned it removing and adding things. Then I used Linksys's supplied GPL sources to build another toolchain based on gcc-3.3 to build the kernel, since Linux 2.4 doesn't build with new gcc… It was all a pain I could have avoided, thus, maybe you will too. :)