OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Installing OpenWRT (Barrier Breaker) on x86_64 machine

The content of this topic has been archived on 2 May 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

I have an old machine lying around, which I was using as router up until a few years ago. I was running OpenBSD with pf, to do NAT and pretty much everything related to being a router.

Since then, I've replaced it with dedicated routers (DIR-600, DIR-615), so I don't use the big machine anymore. Now, OpenWRT comes built for x68: http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_br … 6/generic/
But I don't know how to install it. The only way I can think of, is take out the hard drive, put the image on it manually (with dd or so), but I haven't tested that, and I wonder if I can somehow install it, with the hard drive in situ.

Another way of putting it on the drive, is maybe booting a live OS and do it that way, but I really don't know. As OpenWRT is not coming with an installation environment like any other distro, I'm struggling to think of the "correct" way to do it.

If your machine's BIOS allows for booting from a USB device, put the OpenWRT x86 image https://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_b … 6/generic/  on a USB flash drive and use Win32 Disk Imager to image the flash drive like would be done for a ARM type SOC.  That would be the easiest thing to do if your circumstance allows.

(Last edited by LeggoMyEggo on 31 Mar 2015, 00:47)

It cannot boot from USB, only from CD. However there is a hard drive in that machine. I was thinking maybe booting gparted and writing the image to the hard drive.

Would that be a sensible approach?

Unfortunately only played around with it inside a VM so can't help with an installer, but unless you're doing it for entertainment or education, that sounds like quite an expensive router to run.  Power consumption alone would likely pay for a new, OpenWRT-capable bit of hardware in the space of a few months.

Depending on where in the world you live, the cost of running a 100W PC 24x7 could be well above US$100 per year.

atom wrote:

unless you're doing it for entertainment or education, that sounds like quite an expensive router to run.

It's basically just to play around. There's hardware in it, which I'm trying to try out, like ISDN cards, PSTN modems, and several NICs. Also serial interface and a bunch of USB ports.

I'm trying to make a fax machine (fax server) out of it, just to see if it'll work, etc.

Just curious why OpenWrt?

Why not a full blown linux distribution?  such as Ubuntu.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Router

It might be easier in the long run to find information on what you are trying to do.
such as finding firmware/support/compiling and etc.

I don't know... but I can imagine it would work to just dd the image to the first hard drive and try to boot from it.
Nevertheless, whatever you find out, please post it here smile
...I am often sleepless thinking about what it would be like to install OpenWRT on a real computer!

pow4ever wrote:

Just curious why OpenWrt?

Why not a full blown linux distribution?  such as Ubuntu.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Router

Because I'm familiar with OpenWRT, and I like it's out-of-the-box working principle. Also, it might be easier to port it to a smaller device, which has rather minimal hardware, plus an analog modem.

zo0ok wrote:

I don't know... but I can imagine it would work to just dd the image to the first hard drive and try to boot from it.
Nevertheless, whatever you find out, please post it here 
...I am often sleepless thinking about what it would be like to install OpenWRT on a real computer!

I'm a little amazed nobody has done this, really. Then again, I'd assume that developing it is probably done on VMs, that are emulated x86/ARM machines.

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