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Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Project For a Router/Wi-Fi Access Point?

Posted by timothy on from the what's-the-nsa's-least-favorite dept.

An anonymous reader writes "My wireless router just died. I have an old netbook lying around that has a wired network interface and a wireless one. The wireless card is supported in master mode by Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. What does Slashdot recommend I use to turn it into a router/wireless access point? DD-WRT? pfSense? Smoothwall? Fedora/Ubuntu/OpenBSD with a manual configuration? I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty and I know what I'm doing, but I want as close to zero maintenance as possible."

1 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DD-WRT on Buffalo hardware by mellon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a little bit surprised to see DD-WRT getting such prominent billing. I've been using OpenWRT very happily for a long time, and had trouble getting DD-WRT to do what I want. It's possible that things have changed since I last investigated, of course.

    I'm a bit biased in that I wanted something hackable; I've been able to make packages for OpenWRT and have them work with very little effort, and even been able to debug stuff under gdb on the router. This is probably also possible with DD-WRT, but when I investigated, OpenWRT seemed clearly easier to develop on. Building the router image from source was dead easy; customizing it was easy with "make menuconfig" and building packages within the build tree (with support for the packages in "make menuconfig") was easily done as well.

    My point here isn't to say "don't use DD-WRT," because I have nothing bad to say about it; rather it is that it's worth considering OpenWRT as well. Personally I've had a lot of success with it, and recommend it highly as a development router OS.