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Cisco Rumored To Be Selling Linksys
New submitter drdread66 writes "Cisco seems to be giving up on another technology acquisition. Hot on the heels of a full writedown for shuttering Flip Video, Cisco is now looking at another potentially huge loss from unloading Linksys."
I'm glad they're suffering. They deserve to suffer for their decision to force their evil cloud firmware on people.
I have a (refurbished) WRT150N, and have bought two others for parents/grandparents. With the stock firmware, they're everything you described. However, with DD-WRT, they've been some of the most reliable devices I've worked with, up to and including Cisco's enterprise hardware. I've had a similar experience with one of their newer models (E2000 or something? I forget the actual number) - ultimate crap with the stock firmware but excellent performance and reliability under DD-WRT.
All the people here on /. should know that most recent-ish 'Linksys' gear is supported by aftermarket firmware; DD-WRT and Tomato among others. Granted, a lot of people might not know the difference, but they run much much better than the shit that ships on them.
Hell, I'm still using a WRT54G from forever ago, and it's been online almost constantly (barring my tweaking and futzing up the install occasionally) since mid-2005. No slow-downs, no hiccups (not counting misconfigurations), etc, etc. And this is old old MIPS with 16MB RAM, guys. You know in the newer (WRT120N was mentioned above) hardware should at the very least perform as well as previous products, if not better. But it doesn't. Flash your firmware, and see the difference. Seriously. I'm sure if they cam pre-installed with something like Tomato, out-of-the-box, Linksys wouldn't have this weird brand identity crisis. But of course, Cisco and open-source are at polar opposites of the world, it seems. Also, WTF Slashdot? It's 2012, please get a WYSIWYG editor, instead of arcane HTML formatting and such. Line breaks.
I'm sure it's undergone minor revision changes since then, But I bet the bulk of the hardware and software remains unchanged since 2003.
Just a note, for the reference of anybody reading this: The WRT-54/GL is very similar to the wildly popular classic WRT-54G that put the 'WRT' in 'OpenWRT' and 'DD-WRT'. However, the WRT-54G(non L) has gone through something like 5 revisions, and the later ones are more or less entirely different animals in the same box. Less flash, less RAM, vxworks(yeah, like hell it works) based firmware, poor compatibility with anything but the most stripped down 3rd-party firmwares. In fact, the 'L' model was actually a re-release of the older revision designed to cater to the enthusiasts who had been alienated by the later revisions of the 54G.
If you go shopping, just be sure you know which is which. I don't know how the 54GL holds up against the newer models from non-linksys sources; but anything being sold as a WRT-54G(unless it specifically specifies one of the earlier, better revision numbers) is shit and probably not worth the money.