The Consolidated Hacking Guide for the Linksys WRT54GL

I recently acquired a Linksys WRT54GL wireless broadband router. The nice thing about this piece of networking gear is that it runs Linux. There is an abundance of information on the prior model (WRT54G) of this series on the Internet. In fact, there is so much information that I had over twenty tabs open in Firefox of various web sites to sort through just to get the information that I needed to hack on my new router. So I decided to write this guide to save others from information overload.

The “L” in the model number, WRT54GL, stands for Linux. The previous models of the WRT54G are also powered by Linux (version 1.0 to 4.0). The latest version of the Linksys WRT54G is version 5.0 and runs VxWorks. The move to VxWorks cut the memory footprint in half according to Mani Dhillon, senior manager of product marketing at Linksys. This claim appears to be based in fact because the Version 5.0 model only has 2MB of Flash and 8MB of SDRAM. “We still wanted to have a Linux SKU for the Linux audience,” said Dhillon, hence the WRT54GL.