[ILUG] OpenWRT or DD-WRT

[Niall O Broin]

On 24 Aug 2008, at 23:26, paul at clubi.ie wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, Niall O Broin wrote:
>
>> want with the hardware. But in fact, all I really want is an AP  
>> with slightly more configurability and it seems that DD-WRT will  
>> give me that out of the box, without my having to decide whether or  
>> not I want (or need) the X-Wrt web interface.
>
> Well, that's a pretty easy decision for most people.. ;)

Yes, of course, but it's a decision nonetheless, and it seems not the  
only one I'd have to make before I'd install OpenWRT.

> One of the nice things about OpenWRT is that it has a package  
> system, you can always 'ipkg update; ipkg install ...' after the  
> fact (e.g. tcpdump can be pretty useful, though its a large package).
>
> I can't imagine why you wouldn't want OpenWRT:
>
> - very nice web-frontend, with fancy SVG, real-time graphs of CPU,
>  network interface usage, etc..
>  - but you can leave it out if you'd prefer the extra room to
>    install utilities to
> - also easy to use from command-line (nice config system)
> - easy upgrades (kamikaze+)
> - actually advancing the state of open-source, embedded routers,
>  rather than leeching..
>
> And yes, it's very configurable, if you want. I don't see how this  
> turns into a minus-point though..

It turns into a minus point because very configurable usually ==  
taking more time and effort to do what you want, iff what you want can  
be provided by a less configurable solution. This argument is of  
course had repeatedly in the OSS world, most notably I suppose in the  
KDE v Gnome arena (where I come down on the side of KDE, not least  
because it's more configurable than Gnome) but as you said

> But whatever floats your boat ;)

and in this case I think I will go with DD-WRT because this  
installation is not for me, and its only objective is to provide an AP  
which is more stable than the current one, and the ability to crank up  
the power output somewhat may also be useful. However, I'd like to  
play with OpenWRT too and I'm sorely tempted to buy a second one for  
me :-)


Niall