I just signed up on OpenWRT (forum and wiki) and I thought I should introduce myself.  I don't know if such is a common practice (I don't see any intro postings, but then, I don't know how often new people join in here).

Until just recently, I've pretty much ignored wireless routers.  I didn't need one until a few weeks ago.  Then I recognized multiple needs were coming, so I decided I better get try things out.  Turns out to be a disaster because I made assumptions about how things were designed (things that seemed so obvious to me that I just didn't bother researching).  So in the trial by fire, I got to learn quite a lot of things real fast (that, ironically, I might not have learned for ages had things worked as I expected).

I attempted to make 2 Netgear WGT624 routers talk to each other.  Turns out they operate the radio side as access points (this not being documented in any Netgear literature, specs, or user guide). That didn't work.  The routers have been returned for refund.  What I learned during this was about the OpenWRT project.  I had heard a while back that at least one company was using Linux for the OS.  But I didn't know people were building their own custom images to run on them.  So that changed my whole approach and here I am.

However, I'm not one to just settle for "Linux out of the box" and run it like that.  Based on my many years of programming (primarily C, some assembly) experience, networking experience (lots of Cisco), and system administration experience (mainframes and many *nix systems), Linux is like soft putty to me.  I rewrote all the rc scripts from scratch.  I've done small hacks to the kernel.  I've built my own CDROMs where one can boot from either Intel x86 or Sun Sparc, and done so based on Slackware, and then based on Linux From Scratch.

I enjoy the challenge of writing C code to work fast and small, without the need for bloat from dozens of add on libraries (although I am also collecting all my reusable functions into a big library of my own).  I often just use dietlibc instead of glibc just for the fun of it. I've been coding in C since 1982 (first on DECsystem-20).

So suddenly I do have an interest in developing, hacking, and packaging stuff for a router and OpenWRT seems like the ideal starting point.  I do have a lot to learn, still, because many aspects of this I still don't know, nor have the tools downloaded to try out.  And since returning those Netgear routers, I've so far held off buying anything new until I'm 100% certain of the direction I'm going.  But it looks like for now the Linksys WRT54GL is it.

I'll have more questions soon, I'm sure.  I've got an unrelated project I'm working on right now and it probably won't be done until the latter part of August.  Then I'll see how much I can dive into working on doing some kind of development with this.