Hosted by David Calkins and Patrick Norton.
Systm is the Do It Yourself show designed for the common geek who wants to quickly and easily learn how to dive into the latest and hottest tech projects. We will help you avoid pitfalls and get your project up and running fast. Read More
Your router gets a major upgrade with the free Tomato Firmware: monitor bandwidth consumption, boost your WiFi signal, make major QoS tweaks, track the results with shiny graphics... and more!
Frank wrote in:
I'd like to give you a project suggestion for Systm: show us the proper method for upgrading an older wireless router with ddwrt firmware.
Frank in Tulsa
Great idea, especially since Patrick's long suffering Linksys WRT54G has been a touch flakey after the last firmware upgrade.
We just want to make one change: DD-WRT is great, but we're more into the Tomato Firmware upgrade... it's a tad less polished looking, but has slightly better quality of service contol than DD-WRT, allows boosting your your WiFi output, and has amazing bandwidth monitoring tools, which are great to keep in mind in wake of the new Comcast cap!
It runs on Linksys' WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers, and, as Wikipedia puts it, is "based on the GPL sourcecode released by Linksys, but includes proprietary binary modules from the chipset manufacturer Broadcom. Portions of the code are licensed under the GNU General Public License, but the source code for the user interface is under a more restrictive license which forbids use without the author's permission." Which is to say, it's Open Source.
You can download the Tomato firmware at polarcloud.com/tomato.
The Tomato Firmware Wiki is incredibly helpful.
Here's the Tomato FAQ if you're curious.
