ASUS WL-Series OpenWRT Tutorial General Information

While the OpenWRT Tutorials presented on theese pages are supposed to be very complete in terms of details provided, some information is not however provided in EVERY tutorial as this is general information that applies to all the tutorials. That information is provided on this page

Page Index

1. Needed basic knowledge
2. Hardware specifics

Needed Basic Knowledge

Unix knowledge

There is no need be to a Unix Wiz to be able to follow theese tutorials, but some very basic knowledge is expected.
It is expected that you know basic shell commands like: cp, mv, dir, ls, cd and so on. If you donw know what I am talking about,
you can probably get up to speed by reading this Basic Unix Tutorial by Idaho State University.

Use of text-editor

As the standard editor in OpenWRT is vi this is what I use. I am not one of thoose people that just loves vi, neither do I hate it. It is an editor, has extermely low memory footprint and it is standard in almost all posix (unix, linux *bsd) systems.
If you dont know how to use vi, there is a small into to vi on the University of Marylands page called vi basics
You can also choose to install a somewhat nicer editor like nano.
I will not in any of my OpenWRT Tutorials go into details about how to use the different editors, I take it you can read on the above vi page, or find information about nano or a simular editor elsewhere :-)

Hardware specifics

All my Tutorials have been created on a ASUS WL-500g Deluxe. This means that all hardware specific things are very much dependant on this choice of hardware. If you use other hardware, some things will differ slightly.

WAN, LAN and WiFi devices

On the ASUS WL-500g Deluxe, the devices are defined as:

In my standard router setup, I bridge the two devices LAN and WiFi together in a device called br0
For other hardware, refer to the OpenWRT Documentation WiKi

External Storage

Due to the nature of the ASUS WL-500g Deluxe, the preferred external storage for additional ipk packages, other software and data files is Harddrives and other USB storage / memory devices, and are hence connected as USB devices.
On other hardware like the ASUS WL-HDD that contains an IDE controller, it would be on a standard IDE device.
If you are using a device like the Linksys WRT54G(S) series, external storage can be either an SD/MMC card or a SAMBA or NFS mount on some server on the LAN or WAN :-)





As more Tutorials on OpenWRT are getting written, more information will appear on this page.
Last update: August 19th 15:50 CET