David R. Meyer wrote:
>Hello All!
>
>I have an older Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless / 4-Port Router. It stinks as
>a router, but I was hoping to put a clean build of Embedded Linux on it
>and start to play with that.
>
>Can anyone suggest any sources for this? I have googled the heck out of
>it "enbedded linux linksys bfew11s4" , etc. and came up with very
>little.
>
>
The first place to look:
http://www1.linksys.com/support/gpl.asp
There are at least four different hardware revisions of the BEFW11S4
(v1, v2, v3, v4), each with a slightly different hardware
implementation. Linksys is notorious for this: as they sell large
volumes of these things, shaving a few dollars off of the iterative
production models with different chips, often horribly limiting the
memory footprint of any given device.
The problem here is that I really can't find any reference to the
chipset used by the BEFW11S4, nor can I find any information on the
various hardware revisions and their flash/ram capacities.
Earlier Orinoco and Apple Airports used an ancient x86 clone CPU and the
Karlbridge firmware, believe it or not. Newer access points have various
firmwares from different development platforms for whatever chipset
designed by whatever manufacturer. Each vendor has various models of
hardware, and varying revisions of each hardware based on production
runs and re-engineering for cost savings (or reliability, or
availability of parts, etc). Each one of those hardware revisions has a
firmware built for a specific range of hardware revisions for any given
model of hardware.
Case in point: the latest WRT54G (v5) has half the flash as the previous
version, and will only run the new VxWorks based firmware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G
If you want a device to hack, find a WRG54G v4 or earlier, or a WRT54GS
(v3 or earlier has twice the RAM and Flash as a v4), or fork out the
cash for a WRT54GL:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4729641740.html
http://www.wrt54gl.com/
http://www.linksysinfo.org/
It's chaos. Alternatively, you can use one of the OTHER vendor's
broadcom reference design based systems with the various Linux firmwares
available from vendors like Asus, Buffalo, Motorola, Microsoft, Siemens,
etc (there are many)
My personal favorite at the moment is the DD-WRT project, though OpenWRT
is a close second.
http://dd-wrt.gruftie.com/dd-wrtv2/
http://openwrt.org/
So, "can I run Linux on a BEFW11S4". From what I can find, the answer at
the moment is "no", and based on the age of the hardware that pre-dates
the newer APs from Linksys that used GPL firmware: that is unlikely to
change.
- Ian C. Blenke <ian@blenke.com> http://ian.blenke.com/
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