I’ve been using various consumer routers hacked with dd-wrt both at home and on campus for years, and was shopping for a new one to use in the apartment I’ll be moving in to in a couple weeks, only to discover that the desired feature set wasn’t possible with dd-wrt. In particular, I wanted 802.11n, Gigabit Ethernet, USB printer sharing, and the ability to share an ext4-formatted USB hard disc via SMB and SSHFS. Hardware with the requisite bits isn’t too hard to come by, but no stock firmware supports the range of printer and storage features I wanted (and most of them are missing basic features and/or just plain suck). DD-WRT isn’t a solution, because it uses ancient kernels that don’t support modern file systems. I figured since OpenWRT was well spoken of and claimed to do everything I wanted when coupled with suitable hardware I would give it a try, and picked up a TP-Link WL-1043ND based on reviews and price, and followed the Wiki Instructions to flash it from the web interface.
This turns out to have been an excellent decision, because not only are the basic packages in OpenWRT a good five years newer than in in DD-WRT, it turns out to be superior in virtually every way. The OpenWRT documentation isn’t as inviting as DD’s, but the install process is no more complicated, the Web GUI is better laid out and more responsive, and features can be easily added and removed with a well-designed, well-integrated package manager (opkg). I’m aware that DD-WRT supports ipkg, but it has always felt hacked on and never worked terribly well for me, but opkg just works on OpenWRT. It even has a friendly Web interface for managing packages. Even the warning about the stock WL-1043ND image not coming with the appropriate WiFi modules is apparently out of date, because everything was already in place.
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