History of ShoRTLinuxShoRTLinux
A little set of straightforward scripts for fast deployment of a mini distro, focused on an Ovislink WL-1120AP with RTL8181 chipset. This set of scripts where built to help anyone with will to install on an Ovislink WL-1120AP a customized linux OS with virtually no effort. Features: - 2.4.31 kernel with RML.1 patches from Jiri Fojtasek - LZMA tar initrd, root on tmpfs: very fast booting, free memory on my AP: 10MB - Routing/Masquerading with IPTables - Wireless tools (iwconfig/spy/list) - Fairly complete busybox - DHCP server (from busybox) - HTTP server (from busybox) - SSH server (dropbear) - Saving/Restoring from flash, supporting three distinct settings (ramdisk-default/factory/user) ShoRTLinux is licensed under the GPL version 2.0 or later. ShoRTLinux project on sf.net - Downloads Self-service. - Forum Get support, discuss about improvements - Patch tracker For you all who wanted to send me patches but didn't know how! - CVS access Keep a daily record of what is changing in the project. (not much at all) - Donate :D Basic things The preferred format is the source, as you will learn how to make and thinker with all the tools. Make sure to read everything. There is some binaries too, if you feel dummy someway - then you should not mess with firmwares! After you download (~600KB) the source package, unpack it. A directory containing anything you will need to start will be created. Everything else it will download (about 70MB) and install. You will need about 1GB of hard disk space to compile everything. Make sure you read the install.sh file which contains more directions. If you just compile and install, you will end up with a wireless client to an infrastructure named "SHORTLINUX", with masquerading for the internal LAN, DHCP server and SSH server. Defaults: IP: 192.168.1.1 Web configuration: enabled, user admin password shortlinux Secure shell (SSH): enabled, user root password shortlinux Good luck. Mini max232 serial howto I've made a max232 serial mini-howto to help recover any bad firmware writes. Portuguese only for now - any takers on translation? Changelog - 2005-09-27 21:33 ShoRTLinux 1.3 Compiled image and source code are at the FILES section of the sf.net project. Lots of changes since 1.2, much of that were bugfixes. HTB traffic control is supported, but the scripts are very prone to be full of bugs. Nobody tested it yet. New style of web configuration, I think the bugs where fixed. Needs more modules but the primary things are working. Site Survey only works if the card is not in master mode, this is expected. - 2005/08/09-20:20 ShoRTLinux 1.2 Fixed the bug that made iptables been compiled *before* the image had been generated. Bummer Nonmips toolchain now moved out of the source tree, and checking if user had it already. BRX changed to 1 again. Libpcap/tcpdump scripts added. Netcat disabled. Services and reboot CGIs added. - 2005/08/07-13:50 ShoRTLinux 1.1 Web configuration scripts added for IP and Wireless. Nothing much more attractive. Moved scripts to etc so you can change and save them. Put some things, removed others, and size got down a little. More on changelog. Tarball on the files section of the project page. I have tested bridging mode now, the box relays packets ok; something is wrong when connecting to the bridge IP, don't know yet. The upgrade firmware from the original ovislink firmware (actually tested with 3.00I version) works for this firmware too! You don't need to use a serial connection to that. BUT you should build the serial circuit if you want to experiment with testing new made-by-yourself images, this way you can recover from a failed firmware upload or just an image that didn't work the way you expected. - 2005/07/29-20:22 Launched ShoRTLinux 1.0 First release TODO: CBQ traffic control. Http server is working, but no web configuration in place yet. Bridging mode is not tested. I ran into some problems with it and had no time to test.
(Eliphas, somewhere in 2005) Well, I got one of these little 1120AP and heard that it runs linux. With these little itch to scratch, I wanted to SSH to it! Muuuust... acceeeeeess... linux... ';)
I downloaded this TuxAP and tried to make it run. It advertises to be a complete linux and all, BUT the developers wanted some money, so the downloaded image was crippled and wouldn't work without installing a "license" on the box (in the advert it is shown as an little "demo", and says that you can rollback your original firmware without problems). What a shame.
So, I had a non-functioning (not only crippled) AP. The thing changed even the AP MAC address and wanted the fscking "license". The support wanted to talk to my money before telling me how to rollback to the original firmware.
Then, with a little googling, I got to the RTL8181 project page, cried for help in the forums, made an MAX232 serial dongle. Now I had access to the firmware. But the RTL original firmware is very far from being a functional linux, so I did go again to the forums and found RealAP. This one was OK for me, but as I tested this and that on the build system, I wished to automate some things. So now I had a bunch of scripts and realized that someone else could benefit from this.
Within about a month from the start of the headache, thanks to the RTL8181 developers from the project/forum and RealAP, I've made this far.