Conceptronic is selling the C54BRS4A (Atheros Based Wireless Router) for a couple of month’s now. That device should be fully GNU/GPL compliant and therefor Conceptronic has released the SoureCode including Toolchain.

Using alternative configurations / images / firmware with the Conceptronic C54BRS4A should be possible as it is running Linux

Me as nono on Linux took the challenge to see if it was / is possible to create a custome made ‘AroundMyRoom’ firmware version

The steps I followed were:

1. Downloaded the NetInst of Debian (debian-40r1-i386-netinst). Debian is necessary to be able to compile sources. I burned the ISO to a CD-ROM and took an old notebook

2. Intalled Debian on it and installed some additional packages afterwards like MC, some GCC tools, other libs and stuff I saw were necessary to use, the NetInst is simple as it is downloading the content directly from the Internet so no hassle with many CD’s ..

3. after Installation I wgetted the SourceFile from the ftp of Conceptronic. Right now they supply two sourcefiles. I needed both files! especially as 1 file (called: ‘RGDB’) was generating an error and a working was was available in the older sourcefile (sigh.. )

4. After the Tar -xvzf [sourcefile] I read the included readme document and followed the guidelines. (C54BRS4A.GPL.readme.txt)

5. The process is clean and simple and if found any error (I found 2) it could be easily fixed

start with:
1. Building the toolchain
 ~# ./build_tool_chain.sh
Select: Generic (MIPS I) (CONFIG_MIPS_ISA_1) and keep the rest default

check the output and if found any error it must be your system missing some special tools (Bison etc.. )

2. Building the image
 ~# source ./setupenv
 ~# make
 ~# make
 ~# make
  ===================================================
  You are going to build the f/w images.
  Both the release and tftp images will be generated.
  ===================================================
  Do you want to rebuild the linux kernel ? (yes/no) : yes
Issues I found:

in folder: c54brs4a/tools/../rgdb the rgdb file creates a segmentation fault when called through the make process. If you download the first gnu/gpl and take the same file the size is different and replacing the exiting rgdb executable for the other one it works ..

in folder: c54brs4a/templates/../c54br4s4a/ the file gendef.sh was creating a make error due to a missing DDNS statement, when commenting out: issue solved. It seems not to affect the creation of the firmware ..
And finally your system will create the firmware files.. Upgrade through the webinterface and you can have your modified firmware .. Hey .. that is what geeks want .. !

If I have some time left tomorrow I will make some internal images ;-)