X86 openwrt install

It doesn't need to be Debian; you can use any Linux distribution. We are recommending Debian because it's relatively quick to create a live USB. At the time of writing, I'm using debian-live You may see a more recent version, but make sure you download the "- standard.

Use putty to connect to the serial port. Putty instructions for Windows are available here and for macOS here. Connect power to APU to boot the system. Select the first option and press Tab. It should look similar to this:. Now you should be logged in either via ssh or through the serial cable as shown above. Make sure you have the WAN cable connected, so you have a connection to the internet.

We need an image called "combined-ext4. Having a router on a pc makes more sense not only for the ability to upgrade the hardware, but you can add so many more features software wise. You are not limited by the memory or space of the boxed routers.

Nothing wrong with the boxed routers for a turnkey setup. If you are like me, you want more. That is why I also use Openwrt. This is a great project to put an old pc back to work. Openwrt is a cousin so to speak of DD-WRT that is installed on many brand name routers to increase their capabilities.

Openwrt will also allow a pc to act as an expensive router without the big price tag. Did this with the original image on a pentium2 and it worked well. If you want the gui, you may need to install the web add-on. With newer versions of openwrt require higher hardware requirements. Check openwrt. Howto get OpenWrt up and running with a web interface given the base image is running. The root partition of the official x86 OpenWrt image is not very big, about 50 MiB.

Many find it too small after installing a few add-on packages. Here I will cover the steps to expand it. For example, these two commands download and uncompress the Alternative, you can just copy an image file from a live USB flash drive.

This will save you the trouble of restoring custom configurations. Note: All commands from this point to the end need to be run by a user with root privilege. To expand a disk partition, it needs to be deleted first. A new, larger partition is then created to take its place. This new partition must start from the same sector as the old to prevent loss of data. The -u option asks fdisk to list partitions in sectors. The -c option tells fdisk to operate in DOS compatibility mode.

It also lists two partitions. The root partition starts from sector Make a note of this number. As far as I can tell, the creation and deletion of loop3p1 occur normally. Another thing worth noting: kpartx and fdisk use different naming conventions. This is because kpartx works with the device mapper. Finally, resize the root file system. I had two choices. Not wanting to do more work, I went searching and found Plop Boot Manager.

It is very impress. Compact but full of features. It handles multiboot. It works with many bootloaders. Writing ext4-rootfs. When using dd , it will preserve partition's actual size, it won't revert its size to image's. For uncompressing rootfs. It may be tempting to not delete config files, but the risk isn't worth it, because some file may conflict and not be properly upgraded.

It's safer to backup config files as we should also backup whole drive before upgrading and copy them back after upgrading. I suggest going further and having a Subversion repository on another computer where all config files are saved and their changes are tracked, and use rsync to sync between the repository working copy and production files on the router. Anyone can compile OpenWrt from source, but it's a complex procedure with many options which require some experience, specially for using it on a production router.

Different from compiling, we can build our own custom image using the Image Builder. This doesn't compile the whole software, instead it downloads required packages from the same repository used by OpenWrt to install them. Image Builder builds the same image files used for installing and upgrading OpenWrt.

Due to that it's much simpler than compiling and offers great advantages, like adding directly to the image all packages we need, removing those we don't need, and also adding to it our config files. Having packages on the image, we don't need to reinstall all of them after an upgrade. And having our config files directly on the image, we don't need to reconfigure everything or copy all files from backup, which is specially difficult when default network configs don't work with our router's interfaces or it doesn't start with correct IP address.

In many cases, OpenWrt will be back fully working on first boot after upgrading. Another advantage for building a custom image is when the default rootfs partition size is too small to store all packages and we need to resize it. Note that, when following above procedures of installing then resizing partition and upgrading by writing partition image or extracting rootfs.

Doing so would result in the too large image file and would require enough RAM to store the whole file during building. It's recommended to use on the image just enough size to store all packages plus a small amount of free space. Once the building environment is setup, we use the make image command to build an image, which results on a set of files with the types of images described on this page.

The command make info lists default packages list. FILES parameter is used to add custom config and script files to be added to the image, it points to a folder which represents root folder when OpenWrt is running.

We can either edit. Show pagesource Old revisions Backlinks Back to top. There are multiple targets for x86 OpenWrt, some are targeted at old or specific hardware and their build defaults may not be suit modern x86 hardware: 64 is for modern PC hardware anything from around onward , it is built for bit capable computers and has support for modern CPU features.

Choose this unless you have good reasons not to. Generic is for bit-only hardware either old hardware or some Atom processors , should be i Linux architecture, will work on Pentium 4 and later. Use this only if your hardware can't run the bit version. Geode is a custom Legacy target customized for Geode SoCs, which are still in use in many aging networking devices, like the older Alix boards from PCEngines.

Due to how this image is assembled, you will have only ish MB of space to store additional packages and configuration, and extroot does not work. Features like Failsafe Mode or Factory Reset won't be available as they need a read-only squashfs partition to function. It's highly recommended to remove all script and compiled files before extracting, to avoid conflicts.