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Netgear Launches Open Source-Friendly Wireless Router

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 28, @08:10PM
from the market-linksys-chose-to-mostly-ignore dept.
Wireless Networking Communications Hardware Hacking Hardware
An anonymous reader submits news of Netgear's release of the "open source Wireless-G Router (model WGR614L), enabling Linux developers and enthusiasts to create firmware for specialized applications, and supported by a dedicated open source community. The router supports the most popular open source firmware; Tomato and DD-WRT are available on WGR614L, making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. The router is targeted at people who want custom firmware on their router without worrying about issues, and enjoy the benefits of having an open source wireless router."

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  • What's the point of a new wireless-G one? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrchaotica (681592) * on Saturday June 28, @08:13PM (#23986127)

    Here in 2008, I'm only interested in Free Software-friendly 802.11 N routers. Anybody know of any?

  • So they finally decided to stop handing the Linux tweakable router market to Linksys/Cisco, huh? Let's see, how long did that take?

    According to Wikipedia, Linksys cut hardware back on their routers and released the hackable WRT54GL in 2005. So they've done nothing but ignore this market for nearly 4 years.

    Took someone else long enough.

    • Netgear doesn't make money on firmware. They make money selling routers. So if this sells more routers, then fine. But don't look to them to start cannibalizing their sales of Super-G, MiMo or N routers to sell more older on the shelf gear. 614 routers are themselves, fairly old probably as old internally as Linksys open routers. All they did was tweak the gear slightly in light of cheaper hardware now vs 3 years ago.

      BTW, I LOVED my 624v3 Super-G Netgear router, for the 12 months it lasted. Then last month the wireless piece of it conked out. I replaced it with an 824v2 with all internal diversity antennas so the fact that Netgear cheaped out and never built replaceable antenna couplings is moot.

        • Yeah but with routers it's a straight trade off between RAM and ROM size and manufacturing cost. I bet Netgear and Linksys have or had warehouses full of these older G routers or, they had very long job contracts with Solectron and similar spec manufacturing companies. They have to use the inventory or the production runs and it's probably cheaper to tweak the hardware a little bit to accommodate Tomato etc than it is to write off the bulk of it. And, if all goes well they instill a little goodwill with the hobby community and get a peak into some of the requested features they don' deliver.

          Hell, if they play their cards right, commodity routers could all be sold w/o any firmware at all and Netgear and Linksys could save dollars (or Yuan) not having to develop it or support it all. I've often wondered why they would even bother creating v1, v2, v3 and so on of what is essentially the same hardware with the same features and performance if they didn't have to worry about hardware requirements versioning.

    • Re:Losing Marketshare to Linksys (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fallen Kell (165468) on Saturday June 28, @10:56PM (#23987115)
      Dude, Linksys routers were SHIPPED with linux originally back in 2002. Yes, the "L" version came out in 2005, the only reason there is an "L" version is because after v3 of the WRT54G, Linksys removed 1/2 the memory and switched to a proprietary firemware and not open source because they were threatened with lawsuits due to the original versions and not fully complying at first with release of the source code. They felt they had given up too many secrets of how their hardware worked when they had to release the source code in compliance with the GPL, and also wanted to cut production costs. The "L" version was really just a WRT54G version 3 hardware, which they then priced a lot higher...

  • Buffalo anyone? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 28, @08:45PM (#23986347)
    Hasn't Buffalo been shipping routers running DD-WRT for the longest time? Shouldn't we be supporting the people who were doing it the longest?

  • Tomato is not really open source. It is open source except for the UI.
    DD-WRT is just a branch of OpenWRT that costs money. It is free for home use however.

    Use OpenWRt; It is open and free. If you want simplicity, use X-wrt, which is basically OpenWRT with a web based UI. It does not use the latest version of OpenWRT, but is very stable. It includes a smörgåsbord of modules to add with a simple mouse click.

    • MOD PARENT UP. I wish I had points. I used to be a rabid fan of DD-WRT, and I still believe it is the best firmware out there for the WRT series routers. However, the project leader (Brainslayer) has recently started to close source certain parts of the project, and it seems he is working to make it unusable in open-source form (i.e. requires proprietary code to function at all). Basically, he's pulling a Sveasoft move here and screwing a great number of the people who donated time and money to make the system work in the first place.

  • Netgear is correcting their screwup (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hanzie (16075) * on Saturday June 28, @09:22PM (#23986549)
    Apparently a number of the new WGR614L router boxes got WGR614v9 routers instead.

    This page:

    WGR614L really a WG614v9? [myopenrouter.com]

    talks about it.

    May 16, 2008 3:36 PM Sean, I am the Product Line Manager for Wireless Products at NETGEAR and I apologize. Please do send me your contact information and I will send you a WGR614L version out immediately. There had been an issue with one of our distributors and a few V9 versions was shipped out by mistake. We have recalled, but I guess you were one of the unfortunate ones to get a V9. Again, I apologize. My email address is **DELETED** Please do send me your address. Regards -Som Pal Choudhury Senior Product Line Manager, Advanced Wireless NETGEAR Inc.

    I removed his contact numbers and email address. They're on the page I linked to, and he really doesn't need a slashdot post of his vitals, he's got enough problems right now.

    Nice to see Netgear's on the ball.

    Apparently Netgear's guy responsible is personally taking care of the problem.

    hanzie

  • About time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hyc (241590) on Saturday June 28, @10:40PM (#23987029) Homepage Journal

    I think they're just acknowledging that they can't write firmware to save their lives. I had a WG602 that would always lock up after a few days of use; the lockups would happen sooner after big ftp/scp sessions. Basically the damn thing had a memory leak. Updating to the latest firmware didn't help; I finally replaced it with a Linksys.

    (Oh yeah, and they also promised upgradability to 802.1x WPA when I bought it, and never released a firmware update with WPA support.) AFA I'm concerned, this is the smartest decision they could possibly make. Now they don't have to bother with fake promises of future firmware upgrades, they can just leave it to their customers to upgrade at will. And people buying these routers won't have to put up with buggy firmware without any recourse.

    Of course I still think it's too late; I've completely sworn off ever buying Netgear again and have stuck to Linksys...

    • Re:no USB? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Nossie (753694) <IanHarvie@4Devel ... T.Net minus poet> on Saturday June 28, @08:35PM (#23986285)

      and no gigabit ethernet? wake me up when I can get a netgear adsl wireless n+ router with fricking gigabit ethernet!

      open source or not I'd buy it :(

      • Re:no USB? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LarsG (31008) on Saturday June 28, @09:42PM (#23986657) Journal

        What the hell do you need USB for?

        If it had 802.11n and a 4-port GigE switch I wouldn't complain, but the current hardware spec on this thing makes it just a clone of the good old wrt54gl. It is really nothing new or exciting at all, just a clone of a Linksys product.

        Now, with some USB ports you can do all sorts of additional stuff. External harddisks. Printers. Scanners. NAS for your home network. uPnP media server. Network printer/scanner server. Look up all the things people have been using NSLU2s for and then imagine a device that has the capabilities of both the 54GL and the NSLU2.

          • Re:no USB? (Score:5, Informative)

            by afidel (530433) on Sunday June 29, @02:15AM (#23987985)
            Hahahaha, you think a multi-hundred mhz cpu can't saturate a 100Mb line, I did it with a 66Mhz pentium. Also you save a TON on power by using a low power device like these as a low volume file server. I wouldn't hang an entire office off one, but they have more horesepower than most of the fileservers had when I started in the industry, and we made those work somehow =)

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