International PandoraBox/OpenWrt updated, based on a newer yet PandoraBox release 1696.
Since PandoraBox keeps evolving to include more and more packages, with this update I took a new approach and as an experiment decided to keep most of what was added, only removing the China-specific stuff, FTP server, MWAN, and the (incomplete anyway) translations to languages other than English.
As a result, the current version includes in particular IP Bandwidth, the traffic accounting interface that I used to remove with my patch and Transmission, a BitTorrent Client (new in this release), as well as a couple of other packages that will be immediately noticeable from the Web interface menu. All the kernel modules that were originally provided have also been kept, with the single exception of the Simplified Chinese codepage.
Hopefully this change is in line with what (at least the most vocal) people wanted, so let's see how it works out.
As you will notice immediately when trying to log in to the Web interface, PandoraBox now comes with the Material theme as the default one. I kept it this way and made it the default in the Optimal version as well. The previous Bootstrap theme is still included however, so you can switch back to it whenever you want to. I fixed the double-slash URL issues in both of them and also removed the badly-formatted "Loading..." text in the Material theme, so it should be really enjoyable.
This new PandoraBox version also seems to have added support for some USB network cards through kernel modules: a question about it was asked before, and now it should be possible to deduce whether a card is supported by looking at the file list in /lib/modules/....
There are now three international PandoraBox versions to choose from, so hopefully there will be something for everyone:
Release 1216 has been used the longest and seems to work well with packages from the repository. It is also the smallest in size.
Release 1597 improves 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi performance and backports some functionality from newer OpenWrt versions but trying to install certain packages on top of it seems to fail for some people.
Release 1696 has the potential to be the best PandoraBox yet but only time will tell whether this is the case. It also remains to be seen whether there is any impact on performance due to its larger size.
I have been using release 1696 myself since I finished patching it earlier today and it works well for me but since I want to share it with everyone as soon as it is available, it could not be extensively tested, so please have that in mind.
New version of Breed bootloader also available
In other news, there is also a new version of Breed bootloader (release 833). According to the changelog the update was principally about adding support for more devices but maybe there are some smaller changes that did not warrant a mention. I mirrored it in the downloads folder but did not get to try it myself yet.
Thank you everyone, and hope you enjoy it.
(Last edited by StrangeOrange on 26 Jan 2016, 19:39)