OpenWrt RC4 White Russian is out...

Yesterday at 10pm CET, the OpenWrt guys released their RC4 of the upcoming "White Russian" operating system for the Linksys WRT54G(L|S) and similar Broadcom-based routers.

What's so exciting about that? You can see the changelog at their webpage (http://openwrt.org/), but the real cool thing [TM] about this distribution is that it's modular and small. It doesn't try to be everything for everyone - in fact managing a clean OpenWrt installation requires some deeper knowledge of the packages you want to have and use. So for almost every special purpose there is already a solution or at least a package available, which you can install using an 'ipkg' command - very similar to Debian's 'dpkg'. A clean uninstall like this is possible as well, and that makes it IMHO the operating system of the future - free (GPL), friendly, and flexible.

For the first time, a web-based management of the basic router & access point functionality is built in. It supports WEP2. And with more knowledge or demand, you can add (via the command line) things like SNMP, make it a hotspot with or without Radius authentication, make it part of a WDS (Wireless Distribution System - a kind of "mesh" with several other access points), and so on. The possibilities are only limited by our imagination. And all this runs on hardware below the 100$ (some 70 Euro) border.

Great work, guys. Cannot wait to come home and try it out. Thanks.

cheers, wjl aka Wolfgang Lonien