About a year ago I did a bit of research and decided the Linksys WRTSL54GS had as impressive a feature list as any wireless router.
It's a really cool little box. It has as much CPU and memory as any router of the time. (I haven't looked to see if they're better now, but a year ago the trend was for slower, less-memory routers), a USB port, and runs OpenWRT just fine. Its only major problem was that its antenna isn't removable. That was no biggie for me b/c I don't want any longer range and if I ever do, heck, even I can solder an antenna!

So I bought 2. One for my place, one for Dad's.
And had problems pretty quickly with both.

I used them for a while with the Linksys firmware.
And dad and I both had wireless connection drops. Especially him, I didn't use the wireless much.
So I tried changing the wifi channel settings. No change.
So I switched routers with him.
No change, we both still had occaisonal drops, especially him, usually on the order of a quick drop every other day.
When I'm home if I push a lot of data (like copying CD images or VMs) over the wireless, it drops very often. Every 10 minutes sometimes.

So I put OpenWRT on his router.
I'd planned on doing that eventually anyway and now I had a really good excuse for it.
But there was no change.
The router dropped connection as often w/ OpenWRT as it did w/ the Linksys firmware.
I've also tried leaving the router out with a fan blowing on it to try to see if heat was a problem and it drops just ask often, about once every other day.

I see the release notes for the latest Kamakazi [ http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.09/release.txt ] say:

And I see my Linksys WRTSL54GS's use Broadcom.

Are Broadcom chips just problematic? I see my Dell laptop from 2005 has a Broadcom WiFi adapter that works well enough.

Anyway, bottom line, what are the 'best' routers out there for the new OpenWRT?

There was a problem with the older Broadcom drivers for a while.

This affected Linksys factory firmware equally with WhiteRussian as they used the same binary drivers.

I recall someone had found a way to wedge the very latest Broadcom drivers into the WhiteRussian build and it worked just fine.

I loaded Kamikaze 7.09 with 2.4 kernel and haven't had any problems I think it must use more recent Broadcom binary driver also.

Supposedly the open-source b43 driver will make this all go away whenever that gets finished.

Also I am looking strongly at "Wiligear.com" devices, they look quite good and a lot more room for expansion.  The consumer space is pretty dead these days routers just seem to keep getting tighter on flash & RAM.

Vincent! You're still  here!
You were so helpful last year when I was going through this same thing!
I'm thrilled to see you're still alive and apparently well!

Putting Kamikaze 7.09 with the 2.4 kernel on the router I've got (still under original firmware) shouldn't be a problem.
In the next week I'll try to push data through the wireless until it drops, then put Kamikaze 7.09 with the 2.4 kernel on it and see how much data I can push through it again.
I'll take notes and post what I find in a new thread.
Let me know if there's a more appropiate place to put my findings.

Yep, but I only check in occasionally.

I acquired a little tax deduction, and he takes up my hobby time of late. My last obsession was tracking down those dadgum GPIO 2&3 locations on the SL.  Took me hours with a multimeter probing all over.  I tried tackling RAM upgrade I think it could go to 128 megs but the soldering turned out to be over my head and I ruined a router.  I really haven't done much with it since.

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Har … /WRTSL54GS

I'd be interested to see a note somewhere in the WRTSL54GS Wiki page, which I've enjoyed contributing to.    Perhaps expand the section a little bit on firmware and note the issues with WhiteRussian versus Kamikaze.  There's not really a "right" place for it I can find.

So I've got 2 SL units modded with the serial console stereo-plug thanks to NetPrince great idea, and dual USB ports.  One is my house router and the other was the original experimental SL unit that I keep as a spare.  I'd like to have modded them further but thinking now it's just not worth the hassles. I'll probably retire these and move on to new project.   I'm looking strongly at those Wiligear devices I'd like a little beefier more capable router running OpenWRT.  I also want to be able to run an 802.11a (5-gig) AP and it looks like their WDB-111 will fill that role for me.

(Last edited by vincentfox on 15 Feb 2008, 21:39)

I just bought an alix kit, working on porting all my patches to x86 now.  It looks like it has a lot of potential, I will report how things go somewhere else (probably wiki)...

http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php … cts_id=542

Now that looks like fun!
I was totally sold on the whole idea of buying the case, wifi card, system board, and antenna and putting them together... until I saw the $175 pricetag. And they're out of stock to boot!
Why exactly are these things so expensive?
Looks like the bulk of the price is in ~$125 system board that's on there. And the ~$40 mini PCI card.

Actually, I think that red message actually means they are in stock, it was there when I ordered mine.

The board looks to be good quality, and it destroys my wrt54gs when it comes to ram and storage, and probably processing power too.  I'm hoping it will work out well after I get openwrt on it.

http://wiki.openwrt.org/AlixPort

I'm impressed with the speed on this router.  I'm seeing a full 100mbit with my fairly heavy firewall and qos active.