I am currently using a Draytek Vigor router, and wish to power it through a managed UPS.  To save the expense of purchasing a ups with network port and/or management card, I decided that this may be a suitable task for a Raspberry Pi, running apcupsd.

I originally thought of installing ArchLinux for this purpose.  However, I think that I might be able to us the Pi for some other services - particularly those that my current router doesn't handle too well:
o A cacheing DNS server/relay
o An NTP server/relay
o A DHCP server
o A PXE boot server

This led me to consider installing OpenWRT.

So, I downloaded the 'attitude adjustment' Image Generator onto my Ubuntu desktop machine, and set about building a customised image.

However, even without adding any customisation, the 'make image PROFILE=RaspberryPi' command fails.

I see the following reports at the end of the process:

Collected errors:
 * opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package brcm2708-gpu-fw.
make[2]: *** [package_install] Error 255
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/peter/RaspberryPi/OpenWRT/ImageBuilder'
make[1]: *** [_call_image] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/peter/RaspberryPi/OpenWRT/ImageBuilder'
make: *** [image] Error 2

Higher up I see:
"Unknown package 'brcm2708-gpu-fw'."

What am I doing wrong - how can I resolve it?

Edit:
Is this the graphics firmware 'blob'.  Do I need to download it from elsewhere and place it somewhere in my development folders?

(Last edited by Peterb on 6 Mar 2014, 18:52)

I've now tried using several of the pre-built images from the Attitude Adjustment release, and have failed to get any of them to boot on the Raspberry Pi.

Does OpenWRT really run on a Pi?

Yes, it run.

If you want you can try my image:

http://repofulm.dyndns.org/index.php?di … PI/r32074/

Okay, so I must be doing something wrong!

I download one of the images from the Attitude Adjustment release, for instance:
openwrt-brcm2708-sdcard-vfat-ext4_128.img, dated 03-Apr-2013

I'm not clear why there are four different images:
openwrt-brcm2708-Image
openwrt-brcm2708-sdcard-vfat-ext4_128.img
openwrt-brcm2708-sdcard-vfat-ext4_192.img
openwrt-brcm2708-sdcard-vfat-ext4_224.img
.. something to do with the amount of memory assigned to the GPU?

So, on my Ununtu desktop, I use gparted to format a 4GB SD card as fat32 with an msdos partition table.  This sdcard mounts on Ubuntu, and displays an empty file system, as device /dev/sdg1.

I then do
sudo dd bs=2M if=openwrt-brcm2708-sdcard-vfat-ext4_128.img of=/dev/sdg

This reports:
38+0 records in
38+0 records out
79691776 bytes (80 MB) copied, 0.806261 s, 98.8 MB/s

I eject the SD card, place it in the SDCard slot on a RaspberryPi.

When I power up the Pi, it shows one red status LED and displays nothing on the connected hdmi screen.

If I power up with an identical SDcard, with RISC OS installed, all five status LEDs light or flicker, and the RO desktop is displayed.

Similarly, if I power up with a Raspbian, all five status LEDs light/flicker and the boot sequence displays.  I can then login and reach the desktop with startx.

Why do I have no success with OpenWRT?

(Last edited by Peterb on 13 Mar 2014, 13:55)

Well, I finally found an image which boots on my RPi, here: http://code.google.com/p/raspberrypi-op … loads/list

Now I can start playing and see whether I can get it to do what I want!

(Last edited by Peterb on 13 Mar 2014, 13:59)

After a while experimenting with OpenWRT on the Raspberry Pi, I found that some of the packages I required simply weren't available for the build which I had running.

Judging by the lack of response here, not many have managed to achieve a working system.  The one person who did respond (thank you Ramponis) offered an image which, apparently, works for him, but fails to boot on my devices.

I gave up and reverted to my original plan to set up ArchLinux - this went reasonably smoothly and I had all the functionality (apcupsd, dnsmasq [dns, dhcp, pxe], and ntp) I was looking for within a couple of hours.  I am confident that if I wish to add further functionality in the future, this will be similarly trouble free.

That system has now been running my network for a week without any problems.

My conclusion is that OpenWRT for the Raspberry Pi simply isn't ready yet unless, perhaps, you are prepared to build everything from latest sources.  Maybe, one day, it will be viable but, for the present, it is for the real OpenWRT enthusiasts only.

(Last edited by Peterb on 24 Mar 2014, 04:24)

In my case all prebuilt AA images like
openwrt-brcm2708-sdcard-vfat-ext4_128.img
are not booting with my Raspberry Pi (Model B).