I tested everything on an ASUS WL-500GD and a user has reported that it also works on an ASUS WL-500G Premium v.1. The project contains an customised OpenWRT kernel (2.4 or 2.6)  (which will boot from an USB-disk or USB-stick) and an Debian Etch GNU/Linux pre-installed base image, which includes a lot of customisation. The image contains pre-configured out-of-the-box enabled networking, firewall, webserver, Samba server, and more.

Unfortunately there are some issues(see the project pages) with the b43 wireless driver and the 2.6 kernel, so for that reason I created also a 2.4 kernel image with full wireless support.

See the project website http://www.debwrt.net/ for more information. Also if you are interested in how to compile a custom OpenWRT kernel, or how to create an Debian base root filesystem for an embedded device from scratch.

On the b43 driver site the author there writes:

“working

• Station mode
• Mesh networking mode
• Access Point mode (not quite yet, blocked by proper support in mac80211 and hostapd)
• …”

Even though this rather disappointing message, I decided to give it a try on my Asus WL-500gd router. And instead of installing the new kamikaze 8.09 RC1 kernel 2.4 for broadcom chipsets I installed brcm47xx for 2.6 kernels. After flashing and booting the b43 driver recoginzed the wirless broadcom chipset BCM4306.  iwconfig showed a wlan0 interface.  Immediately I tried to change the mode with:

iwconfig wlan0 mode ap

but that didn’t work. It seems that the earlier mentioned hostapd daemon was needed. Hostapd can be installed using the new opkg (like ipkg) interface (update, install). Here is the hostapd-wlan0.conf file (not sure is the correct driver id is selected, but it works):

driver=nl80211
interface=wlan0
bridge=br-lan
ssid=OpenWRT
hw_mode=g
channel=5
wpa=0

Launch hostapd with:

/usr/sbin/hostapd -B /etc/hostapd-wlan0.conf

Output of iwconfig wlan0:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"jewel"
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.432 GHz  Tx-Power=27 dBm
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr=2352 B
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
 
mon.wlan0  IEEE 802.11bg  Mode:Monitor  Frequency:2.432 GHz  Tx-Power=27 dBm
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr=2352 B
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0