As you can read in a previous article I have a Linksys WRT54G running the OpenWRT Linux distribution. In this article I will first describe the default configuration and then show some of the things one can do by changing this setup.
The WRT54G as sold by Linksys is supposedly a router + wireless access point, providing a WAN connector and on the LAN side a 4 port switch, bridged to the wireless accesspoint. This basicly means that you end up with 2 network segments, LAN + wireless on one side, and WAN on the other side. That is what you get to see as consumer, but that is not how the device is put together.
This article is based on the WRT54G v2.2, older versions are very similar but not identical. Specifically, the names of network interfaces will be different for older versions

In a previous article I asked if the X-micro XWL-11GRIX broadband router might be running Linux. In the meantime I did get some responses from readers with additional information about this device.

Linksys uses Linux on their WRT54 and WAP54 series of wireless routers and access points.
Because of the availability of the source code for the Linux version as it runs on this device, there exist several alternatives for the Linksys provided firmware.

X-micro assembles and packages all kinds of devices including 'wireless broadband routers', one of which is the WXL-11GRIX.
Opening up the device tells us that this is in fact a SD9218 CPU (MIPS R3000 clone with integrated networking and peripheral hardware controllers) with a few extra components. This makes one wonder what operating system this device is running...

What do you expect patent attorneys to say about software patents.. No surprise there of course. What is surprising is that supposedly very intelligent people manage to completely fail to understant the situation.

According to this article about a Gartner group report a substantial part of the PCs sold with Linux pre-installed is used to run illegal copies of Windows.

In the following article I'll look at this claim and try to figure out what is behind it (beyond the long standing and very obvious MS bias that the Gartner group has)