OpenWRT on Asus WL-500W

Posted July 8, 2007
Filed under: Asus WL500-W, OpenWRT |

OpenWRT does not yet support the Asus WL-500W although there is some info in the developers blogs about how people got it working. Being a fan of this great project, I gave it a shot and updated the documentation with my efforts. I’ve been using it for about 2 weeks now and it works like a charm.

The 802.11n networking does not yet work. There is a new version of the proprietary broadcom driver in the Asus firmware. It hasn’t been included in the Openwrt CVS but I think this could be the ticket. I’ll give it a shot if I have some spare time in the future.

If you would simply like me to send you the version I complied, give me a quick email at
guarddogit-wordpress (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Update:
I updated the docs to include building of the Webif² package. Works pretty well but not perfectly. I still couldn’t get the wireless working with anything other than the wl_mimo driver which means only 802.11g works.

4 comments so far

  1. Borromini on June 28, 2008

    Hello there,

    Can you tell me what hardware revision you have? I remember, searching the OpenWRT forums, that someone had a certain CVS revision working, but after trying myself (on a model on which I eventually put Oleg’s firmware) without success (OpenWRT couldn’t create a jffs partition etc. and thus could not store any settings, rendering it useless). Reports appeared on OpenWRT’s forum about this new revision (and it not working with the present CVS/available third-party OpenWRT firmware images). Any clues on this would be greatly appreciated :-) .

  2. 88beach88 on July 4, 2008

    It sounds like you used early instructions on the OpenWRT site that didn’t mention to select both squashfs and jffs2 when compiling your own image using menuconfig. The instructions are now even better and you can simply use the latest snapshot image compiled by x-wrt. Very easy.

    I’ve installed umpteen different snapshot versions on 4 different WL-500Ws and all worked well. All 4 routers were bought at different times during the course of a year so I’m assuming they would be of different hardware versions, if there are indeed different versions. I still have two routers at home can’t see a hardware version number stated anywhere on the box. Any ideas how I find that out?

    Regardless, OpenWRT now works pretty seamlessly on the WL-500W.

  3. Andres Aguirre on February 16, 2009

    wich kernel version do you test? 2.6?
    I am interested in receive a compiled version.
    Regards
    Andrés

  4. 88beach88 on February 16, 2009

    Currently only kernel 2.4 works with the Broadcom wifi card. There’s a lot of activity towards getting it working under a 2.6 kernel but I haven’t managed to get it to work yet. I’ll post once I do.

    If you want to run a 2.4 kernel, I’m currently using the following build and it works well:
    http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8.09_RC2/brcm-2.4/openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx


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