Someone had to be brave enough to take on the creation of a 3rd party firmware for this thing. I'm Scott Nicholas, aka neutronscott. This wiki describes my work of porting Linksys' GPL sources to a modern Linux kernel, and subsequently plugging that into the OpenWRT system.

Latest binary is contributed by jdownj@twitter and built 18feb2011.

(insert the hardware device table showing progress again..)

Working: serial port, ethernet ports (WAN and LAN are separate but identical), wifi.
Not working: switch driver (VLANs), VINETIC SPI communications (Power LED control is here), USB, GPIO export.

• @jdownj/twitter contributed this build which includes OpenVPN. http://wrt.scottn.us/wrtu54g-tm-jdownj-openvpn.bin
• My latest default build (ChangeLog): http://wrt.scottn.us/wrtu54g-tm-openwrt-devel-b5.bin
• source is in openwrt trunk: https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/GetSource
• Browse my file store: http://wrt.scottn.us/

Just use Firmware Upgrade under Administration in the web interface.

Maybe 'sysupgrade' works? … Except if you have the old backfire build maybe try this.

If things go sour and you need to start fresh, you can also reflash an entire firmware from the bootloader. The bootloader doesn't offer a TFTP server, but a TFTP client, and access to the serial console is required. The procedure is documented here.

If you break the bootloader as well, you will want to learn about JTAG.

If you got this far, you may find http://openwrt.org/ to have resources on basic usage. Only things device specific are dealt with here. This includes my binary builds being broken, as they usually are. It's worth noting though that your router is now at 192.168.1.1 instead of 192.168.0.1, and the default build includes no web interface! You can use telnet to set a password, and afterwords you'll need to use SSH.

The only device specific function is that during bootup you may hold the SES button to activate fail-safe mode. This is useful for example if: you forgot your password, broke your configuration, or the writable filesystem is corrupted. It boots without mounting the writable system and you can telnet in, and if needed 'firstboot && reboot' to start fresh.

If you need more packages, the user applications from nearly any other mipsel target should work, given that the libraries are at the same version. Replace /etc/opkg.conf with the following:

src/gz adm8668 http://wrt.scottn.us/packages
src/gz snapshots http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/brcm47xx/packages
dest root /
dest ram /tmp
lists_dir ext /var/opkg-lists
option overlay_root /overlay
arch all 5
arch brcm47xx 10
arch adm8668 20

Failing that, you'll have to build your own or ask on the mailing list.

If you require functionality that is not included in a basic build (i.e. IPv6 or PPPoE), then you may have to build it yourself. This is because I don't have a full package repository yet.

There is a mailing list available at http://lists.scottn.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/adm8668
You can contact me personally by methods described here.
I'll try to help out where I can, but honestly the active development pretty much ended after the patch was sent off for inclusion into OpenWRT. Other users have been assisting each other as well with questions and builds. Thanks everyone! :)

It's not too complicated.

• Get into Linux. Install the devel essentials, svn, …
• Checkout OpenWRT: svn co svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk
• Configure OpenWRT: make menuconfig
• You are only required to select the target. Infineon ADM8668 WildPass. The rest is up to you.
• Issue make and take a nap.

I tried building the entire thing, and it didn't workout. We really need the OpenWRT guys to include our platform in their buildbot snapshots. :(

• Helmut Schaa – His work on the Ralink SoC devices with OpenWRT led him to becoming a maintainer for the rt2x00 wireless drivers. His patience with me and his tasklet patches significantly improved the wireless throughput for this device.
• Mayckel (a guy from Curacao) – for being my guinea pig and putting up with my firmware breaking his routers. ;)

Below are pages which I haven't included yet in this new index page. I'm trying to change this to include more things in one page with proper headlines to make reading easier.

• OpenWRT backfire (ChangeLog) – the (obsolete) build based on backfire and kernel 2.4
• Firmware – the (obsolete) non-openwrt firmwares i made.
• Building your own – How to build the firmware from source.
• Device Info
• Boot log
• Boot log v2.6 – (old)