WTR45GS Finally Has Useful Firmware
A while ago, I had purchased a Linksys WTR54GS as a travel companion. 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 device? The firmware–something Linksys never bothered to update beyond the initial shipping version. The router’s web interface was slow and frequently had issues. A problem with nearly every Linksys router since they switched to using VxWorks instead of Linux.
Leave it to the fine folks being DD-WRT for figuring 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.
About 10 minutes later, I had removed the crappy VxWorks-based firmware and had the latest DD-WRT up and running in no-time. The web interface 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.
