Installing OpenWRT on Alix3d2 board

Talk about Documentation
1

Hello,

I have looked an Wiki pages and found that the Alix is a little bit left behind. quite reasonably, as it is EOL for several years now, depending of the product. It was a rather good run, as the processor was recycled for about 30 years in this field where 3 year old tech is usually considered obsolete. However, if you, like myself, have several of these lying around, OpenWRT is probably the easiest and most current system to install on these beautiful machines. They are exceptionally reliable, as I have several of them working for 15-18 years, non-stop, in -20...+40 degrees Celsius.

Anyway. I have downloaded 19.07 and wrote it to a CF card, as descried on PCEngines Alix page (https://openwrt.org/toh/pcengines/alix#flashing_by_compactflash) but using the image above. Editing the boot options varies from version to version from OpenWRT 10 (as mentioned on Alix page) to 19.07. However if you can change serial port speed easily on your computer, than it is not so neccessary to do it, but I did ti anyway.

So far, I did not manage to extend the parttition without any damage to it. I tried doing it from my Ubuntu desktop, but I think I will resort to fdisk in the future. Right now, my tests are done on 512MB CF card and system sees only part of it:

root@Alix3c2:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 104788 12744 89916 12% /
tmpfs 125720 240 125480 0% /tmp
/dev/sda1 16084 3160 12600 20% /boot
/dev/sda1 16084 3160 12600 20% /boot
tmpfs 512 0 512 0% /dev

Hoever, update do 21.02.07 went without problems.
Upgrading second to 23.05.5 and later to 24.10.1 also went ok.
At the time of writting, this is the last version available for this paltform.

System

Hostname Alix3c2
Model ?
Architecture Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS
Target Platform x86/geode
Firmware Version OpenWrt 24.10.1 r28597-0425664679 / LuCI (HEAD detached at 2ac26e56) branch 25.103.51521~2ac26e5
Kernel Version 6.6.86
Local Time 2025-07-01 22:16:02
Uptime 0h 1m 50s

I have added curl, WireGuard and openssh server to the installation, and some scripts for tasks that I need Alix to do, and it is just capable enough to do it.

I would appreciate if someone could update the PCEngines Alix page in OpenWRT wiki. If nobody wants to, I could do it.
Thank you for supporting and using this legendary piece of hardware.
Cheers!

2 Likes
2

I moved your topic to documentation section.
Please type your paragraph(s) along with wiki links that need to be amended.

3

I'm late to the party, have an APU2 as my edge router that's only been in service for 5 years... :grinning_face:

Now that you're on 24.10, you can use owut to do your sysupgrades and resize the rootfs partition as part of the upgrade process.

4

Thank you for pointing out that owut can be of use here. However, owut has limit to size of 1024MB and many of us use larger CF cards.

Furthermore, the original text of the Flashing by compact FLASH paragraph states under section 8 that one should mount the CF and edit the /boot/grub/grub.cfg in order to change the speed of serial port. I feel that one should have an alternative to change the default speed in Alix BIOS, therefore we could insert the text:
Alternatively, we can change the default speed of the serial port of Alix board.

Power the board and during the BIOS memory check press s in order to enter the tinyBIOS configuration utility.
Press the number 1 to change the BIOS's serial console rate to 115200 baud Alternatively you can enable LBA mode on the CF card, by pressing L and U to enable Ultra DMA. Using E will enable PXE booting, if needed. When done, press Q to quit. Finally, confirm that you wish to save these changes. >

Furthermore, I would suggest that while CF card is already edited, we can add a section 9, wehere we can add that

one can change /etc/config/network under section config inteface 'lan', option proto 'dhcp' in order to use DHCP, or simply to edit default IP address 192.168.1.1 of their Alix to a more practical one.

Next, the section that decribes the use of wget and dd to download and write the OpenWRT to a CF card should be updated to a current version.

Furthermore, I have tried to use fdisk and tune2fs to resize the partition, but I did not had such luck with ext4 filesystem. Perhaps we could edit this out and insert an advice on how to use owut instead and increase the filesystem size - to 1000MB perhaps?

5

I am using same sd card o nraspberry, basically make 2nd half of storage a data partition and care not about 1st half, you can even install ubuntu there if you need (just my 1c)

6

Alix does not use SD but CF cards, and it is a bit different. Installation does make a second partition of about 100MB, and the rest leaves free. I would very much like to use this part also. Of course, I could create another partition format it, mount it somewhere, and use it as such.

Also...I am not sure if I can install Ubuntu on the rest of the space? As far as I know, maybe Debian 12 i386 could be installed, probably using netinstall and PXE netboot. But I digress.

7

Yes, add new partition roughly covering 2nd half of card. Or something like 2GB away from start. So far sysupgrades kept it intact, but even if that fails i could find 5yo terminal transcript and add back partition where still untouched filesystem stands.

8

I agree, that is up to user. However I still feel that we could edit the parts of the wiki page about Alix install, as info about how to change tinyBIOS settings is not widely known, and while one edits the grub.cfg, editing default IP address in /etc/config/network is also handy.
One has never been in position to edit it while installing OpenWRT in some router.

Also, updating the start of Using pre-built images section talks about 10.03.1 and 19.07 with clear mark that it should be deleted. It is old platform, but deserves some love, so to say.