Jason Self, Denver Gingerich, and others have been developing LibreWRT, a free distro of a rather different sort -- building an image that gets flashed onto a router or whatever. I think it may have been mentioned on this list already.
Jason and I were talking about it recently. I'll append the info from him. It uses linux-libre and otherwise meets the usual criteria, as far as I can see. There are a few stalenesses on the web site but I don't see any stoppers. Comments, considerations, thoughts? karl Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2012 09:50:07 -0800 From: "Jason Self" <[email protected]> To: "Karl Berry" <[email protected]> The website is http://librewrt.org. The process to build a firmware image for either the Ben Nanonote [1] or the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router [2] (the only devices supported at this time) are on the website [3]. Please ignore the part about "Getting the source code"; that needs updating. You can download it from [4]. The general idea is that it's a bunch of scripts that download a copy of GCC, etc. and make a cross-compiler for the target device within the expanded librewrt directory. [...] embedded systems like this don't usually have much in the way of RAM, CPU horsepower, etc. so you generally don't do the compiling on the actual device but on something more powerful. Even if it were possible for it to complete (assuming you don't run out of RAM or something) the low-power CPU would take forever, or at least long enough to simulate forever. :) Depending on what software you select during the "make menuconfig" stage it will then proceed to download other software (like Linux-libre, Busybox, etc.) and build the firmware image that you can then flash onto the device. Denver Gingerich recently made a firmware image for that Buffalo router with good results [5] but there are still some outstanding bugs to fix before this version is released and before we can really say the Buffalo router is supported. [1] http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote [2] http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wireless-n-routers-access-points/airstation-highpower-n300-gigabit-wireless-router-wzr-hp-g300nh-v2/ [3] http://librewrt.org/index.php?title=How_To_Build_LibreWRT [4] http://download.librewrt.org/creative-craftsman/pre-alpha0/librewrt-cc-alpha0-src.tar.bz2 [5] http://lists.librewrt.org/pipermail/dev-librewrt.org/2012-February/000469.html
