DD-wrt X86 Installation How-to

DD-WRT X86 Instalation Tutorial

Written by GrayFox

Sunday, 01 July 2007

In this tutorial I will explane how to install DD-WRT X86 What is dd-wrt DD-WRT is a routing operating system based off of Linux. It was originally released as a third-party firmware for the popular Linksys WRT54G router. Now with it no longer limited by the small 16MB of ram and slow CPU in the WRT54G you don't have to worry about resource usage. Files needed I suggest grabing the latest version of DDWRT X86 the download page is here. At the time of writing this the following links had the latest version. physdiskwrite (needed for Windows) dd-wrt_public_vga Requirements: An X86 compatible pc (i386) or greater with at least 16MB of RAM, 2 network cards, and a hard drive. The files listed above. Test platform For my test platform I used a Pentium 3 450 with 384MB of ram and a 10.4GB hard drive. The network cards were the following: Intel Pro/1000MT Desktop Adaptor Integrated 3COM nic. Linux/OSX Instructions Step 1- Open your computers case and plug in the hard-drive that you wish to install dd-wrt onto. Step 2 - Open up your console/terminal program. Step 3 - Become a super user and enter in your super user password (Or if your on Ubuntu or OSX just type sudo before the dd command.) Example: su Step 4 - Navigate to where the image file is located. Step 5 - Use the command dd to write the image to the desired hard drive /dev/hda =Primary Master /dev/hdb =Primary Slave /dev/hdc =Secondary Master /dev/hdd =Secondary Slave Example: If you wanted to write the dd-wrt image to your primary master drive, you would using the following command. dd if=dd-wrt_public_vga.image of=/dev/hda Live CD The instructions are exactly the same as for Linux but you don't have to put the hard-drive into another machine. I suggest using KNOPPIX or DSL Linux if you want to do a live CD install. Windows Installation To install this on Windows, it's just as easy as with Linux. Step 1 - Open your computers case and plug in the hard-drive that you wish to install dd-wrt onto. Step 2 - Open the command prompt. (Windows XP, 2000, 2003= Start>Run>cmd) Step 3 - Navigate to the directory where physdiskwrite.exe is and where your image is. Step 4 - Enter the following command : physdiskwrite -u dd-wrt_public_vga.image Step 5 - Select the disk you want to install dd-wrt to from the list. DD-WRT After you have imaged the hard-drive boot the machine. You should see a login prompt after everything has loaded and booted. Now plug your switch into your eth1 interface (the second network card in your machine, If you have onboard the onboard will be eth0 and your pci card will be eth1.) The web administration interface can be accessed at 192.168.1.1 and the default username is root default password is admin. DD-WRT Wireless Lan I am unsure if DD-WRT currently supports wireless as at the time of writing this I had not tryed any wireless cards I had. The version that runs on linksys WRT54G supports wi-fi as well as sputnik.