Getting X-wrt working on a Linksys WRT54GL

To install X-wrt, it requires OpenWrt to be installed first. I installed OpenWrt white russian, as it seems that X-wrt is still under development for Kamikaze. I followed instructions on their site, downloading the correct firmware and uploading it to my router. Much to my surprise, it didn’t loose any of the settings I had set in my router, including it’s IP address.

Then, to get X-wrt working, was a bit more of a challenge. The recommended way to install it does not work, as it says to go to an auto install page on the X-wrt website, which seems to no longer exist.

So, I tried the command line way, which is supposed to be:

ipkg install http://ftp.berlios.de/pub/xwrt/webif_latest_stable.ipk

However, this will fail, as it depends on some packages not in the available software list.

The solution to this is to add the following to /etc/ipkg.conf

src xwrt ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/xwrt/packages

Then run ipkg update. After doing this, the first command to install X-wrt worked ok for me.

X-wrt seems to have more features than the default linksys firmware, and a much easier way to administer it, so I am so far, fairly happy with it.