WTR45GS Finally Has Useful Firmware
A while ago, I had purchased a Linksys WTR54GS as a travel companion. Not to be confused with the legendary WRT54GS, which is a desktop router, it is a fairly serviceable router that slides into a nice little compact carrying case complete with an Ethernet cable to jack in a computer or to something else.
The main problem I had with the WTR54GS? The firmware. Linksys never bothered to update beyond the initial shipping version, and the firmware is crap. The router’s web interface was slow and frequently experienced weird glitches. A problem with nearly every Linksys router since they switched to using VxWorks instead of Linux.
The folks behind DD-WRT figured out how to liberate this device from a life of running VxWorks. I followed the rather convoluted steps for getting DD-WRT onto the router. One small hitch I ran into was that the referenced Sercomm utility crashes under XP. However, a quick Google search resulted in finding an update to Sercomm that would make it run under XP.
After about 10 minutes, the WTR54GS was running DD-WRT. The web interface worked and was nice and peppy. All the functionality of DD-WRT is now in my travel bag, ready to convert WiFi to Ethernet or vice-versa.
Now if only Linksys would drop this VxWorks crap, their current routers might not suck so bad.
