Building OpenWrt for a Soekris net4801
After some reading about how journaling file systems could waste my CF because the times it could be written, some people suggest ext2 but who likes it? 
. I’ve also learnt that JFFS2 could be a better solution even thinking it was not designed for CFs so I started to look for a way of generating my own JFFS2 image but guess what? I found
this web site which writes about how to get OpenWrt installed on the Soekris board I own.
I have tried both images on the site (2.4 and 2.6), the first one crashes claiming about rootfs not found on device 1f:00 I tried to pass other parameters to the kernel but no luck for me. The 2.6 version boots but it seem to have some known problems about the eraseblock on the image being different from the drive but I couldn’t get rid off it with the suggestion made on the web site so after asking a little on #openwrt at Freenode I started to build my own image with the latest sources to see if I get better luck .
What does OpenWrt offer me:
- An easy to manage build environment.
- An already working package management tool (ipkg).
- A system designed for small devices providing most needed tools.
- And a long etc.
Starting:
# svn co https//svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/
...
#
At this point we’ve got everything from OpenWrt’s repository now we have to configure our needs in a kernel-style:
# cd trunk/openwrt && make menuconfigConfigure the target image#
Now all what’s left is check all the tools needed by the OpenWrt’s buildroot system, everything’s described in the README included on the sources and run make. Once everything is built, it is saved under the folder named bin
So, seeing how easy the whole process is I have decided to keep building images and packages from HEAD tag and upload them to my ftp server so it can be used directly with ipkg.
