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OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

(openwrt.org)
271 points pykello | 3 comments | 08 Sep 25 16:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.636s | source
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zokier ◴[08 Sep 25 18:44 UTC] No.45172139[source]▶
I love OpenWrt.

But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.

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1. opan ◴[08 Sep 25 19:40 UTC] No.45172929[source]▶
Something with a more normal way of updating the packages and OS would be nice. I thought I'd heard someone was working on an Alpine-based thing a few years ago, but haven't heard anything since.
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2. zokier ◴[08 Sep 25 19:47 UTC] No.45173013[source]▶
They did replace opkg with apk recently https://forum.openwrt.org/t/major-change-notice-new-package-...
3. imiric ◴[09 Sep 25 20:55 UTC] No.45188943[source]▶
Agreed. When I last tried to update packages there was a scary disclaimer about it being likely to break the system, and that flashing a new firmware is preferred.

I nope'd out of that, and don't wish to go through the hassle of flashing again, so my AP is running a year+ old version. It works fine, and I'm not too concerned about it, but I would still like to be able to easily upgrade the system without worrying about breaking it.