FreeWRT is a meta GNU/Linux distribution for embedded systems. In this context "meta" means, you can build the complete distribution from source. FreeWRT is meant to be an appliance development kit (ADK) especially designed for embedded system developers and advanced users.
Our latest stable release is FreeWRT 1.0.3!
The FreeWRT developer team provides a menu based configuration to choose between embedded boards, root filesystem flavours and hundreds of software packages for your own Linux based appliance. The ADK downloads all software packages via the internet and creates a working toolchain (compiler, assembler, debugger), kernel and base system containing only the minimal set of software and drivers to support all integrated hardware of your embedded system. The default firmware image configures existing non-wireless network interfaces so that you can connect via secure shell client to your embedded system after the installation of the firmware image.
The best way to install FreeWRT on a supported device is to use our ADK. One of our goals is, to provide a host independent ADK, which can be used to create your own appliance on Linux, *BSD, MacOSX and Windows. Check the list of the supported build systems to see how many are supported now.
Alternatively you can create a firmware image with our Web Image Builder. The Web Image Builder does not have so many customization options, but is useful to get a feeling about the possibilities of FreeWRT.
FreeWRT supports following embedded devices. We only have support for Broadcom based devices with Linux 2.4. Some very popular wireless lan routers are based on Broadcom hardware, e.g. Linksys WRT54GL, Asus WL500g premium and Netgear WGT634u.
If you like start with FreeWRT, check at supported Hostsystems if your operating system is a supported buildsystem.
Then get the latest stable release from our repository via subversion command line tool:
$ svn co svn://www.freewrt.org/tags/freewrt_1_0_3
Please never build as root!
You can start the menu based configuration via "make". If the prerequisite checks are successful you will get a menu, where you should at least choose a target system. If you exit the menu, you can start the build process via "make" or in more verbose mode via "make v". The buildprocess will download all needed sources via internet (typically about 200MB) and will build a working toolchain (compiler, assembler, debugger), a kernel and a usable basic root filesystem for your target.
If you find any bugs or have any feature requests, please report them to us.
If you like to help please contact us via our developer mailinglist. The users mailing list provides some basic support, but remember we are unpaid volunteers.
I got FreeWRT trunk r3960 to work on my “La Fonera” (FON2100, but according to the helpful nbd, FON2200 is the same) due to the awesome job n0-1@ did in porting that, and some bugfixing of yours truly. Read https://freewrt.org/trac/wiki/Documentation/Hardware/Fon2100 for specs and installation instructions. I’ll work more on that port later. (...)
To fight spammers, we now require a ReCAPTCHA to be entered when editing a ticket. This needs ECMAscript. Sorry.
n0-1 is currently working on supporting the “La Fonera” FON2100 with an atheros-2.6 port of FreeWRT in his spare time after finishing his diploma. Great job!
We now have online manual pages; these appear in the navigation under „Documentation → Manual pages“ and will slowly (...)
