[CUWiN-Dev] Re: CUWIN on Meraki Mini

[David Young]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 03:31:21PM -0500, Bob Keyes wrote:
> Hi,
> I am interested in porting CuWIN to the Netgear WGT634U, which I have
> about 30 of, and my friend has about 50 of. They are very similar to the
> Meraki Mini and the FON, but better, because they have mini-PCI socketed
> Atheros cards and a USB 2.0 controller. Considering the low price of USB
> flash these days, I plan on taking advantage of this (I only wish there
> were right-angle or short USB extender cables that were cheap - having the
> USB flash stick out of the unit like that makes it physically vulnerable
> to being bumped).

Do you have some photos of the insides of your WGT634U?  An important
first step in producing a port is to identify all of the components.
The next step is to get hold of the documentation.  Sometimes that is
easier said than done.

> What I'd like to know, is how to go from NetBSD source to CuWIN - i.e. how
> to do the vast amount of binary shrinkage needed to fit on small flash
> devices. I know there's a tool, I can't remember the name of it now, that
> combines a bunch of BSD binaries into one executable, making it smaller.
> But this didn't seem to save much, because of the large size of libraries
> needed (Maybe I should have built everything static?).

Bryan Cribbs (who is an engineer here at OJC) was working
on a crunchgen version of CUWiN.  His work is on a branch,
<http://svn.cuwireless.net/svn/cuw/branches/crunch/>.

I agree with Matt that ISC DHCP and BIND are "problem software" from
a size point of view.  I saved a significant amount of storage when I
replaced the BIND library and utilities (host, dig) with LDNS from the
NSD project.  Matt's work on udhcp is in our tree.  After replacing ISC
DHCP, we should write a tiny alternative to Quagga.

> There's also a new Atheros based board coming out from linkgear.jjplus.com
> which is really nice. The main developer is a friend of mine. I'd like to
> be able to get CuWIN and BSD onto that box. He's very much a Linux guy,
> I'd like to introduce him to the possibilities of the BSD world (Net,
> Open, Free).

I am sure that we can support the new Linkgear board if samples and
documentation are provided.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933 ext 24