I’m a over-the-hill (older) newbie. I would like to learn OpenWRT with Luci (GUI) and (if possible) avoid CLI. I can find only a very few cookbook references for Luci:
Given all the capabilities of OpenWRT I thought there would be many more links for building OpenWRT with Luci. Am I radically over-estimating Luci’s popularity (and missing that everything is really done through CLI)? Or can someone suggest other Luci cookbook links for a newbie?
Well, OpenWrt is linux based and nobody goes to Linux cause of its GUI. Youd don't need to master UCI, just go to UCI documentation for reference when needed. Start with the basics, log into the router through SSH, for instance using Putty and you can run commands that just show contents of files with the "cat" command, start/stop a service, opkg usage, etc. You can see how the content of a file matches with what's in Luci and so on
I should have mentioned that I have loaded OpenWRT (x86) onto a Sophos SG 105 (1.4 Ghz dual core, 2 Gb RAM, 64 Gb SSD and with Eth1-4) which can be purchased on Ebay for about $50 (not including shipping). So I have an accessible (but not quite functioning) router.
Openwrt pc default is that 1st port is LAN and second port is wan dhcp client, others unassigned.
If you used snapshot accidentelly there is no GUI, you need to go to ssh to install luci after connecting functional wan.