The Grumpy Editor’s Tomato review

“Your editor has just completed an important transition: moving
his Internet connectivity from one evil branch of the local telecom
duopoly to the other, equally evil branch. This change required the
acquisition of a new router; that, in turn, provided the
opportunity to play with Linux-based router software, and Tomato in
particular. Read on for your editor’s impressions of this
impressive bit of (mostly) free software.

“Tomato has its roots in the original Linksys WRT54G firmware.
This firmware was first distributed as if it were proprietary
software, but Linksys, under heavy GPL-enforcement pressure,
eventually made the source available under the GPL. The existence
of this source, along with the ease by which the Linksys routers
could have new firmware installed, led to the creation of a number
of firmware distributions, all of which added new features and
otherwise improved on the original Linksys offering. Over time,
Linksys (Cisco) has incorporated some of these improvements; the
[WRT54GL] company also continues to offer a special version of its
basic household router (the WRT54GL) which is explicitly designed
to allow firmware replacement.

“If a company is going to make a competitively-priced,
Linux-based, user-hackable router, your editor feels an obligation
to buy it. That choice is easy, but the choice of which replacement
firmware to use is harder. There’s a wide variety of offerings,
including OpenWrt, DD-WRT, FreeWRT, and Tomato. There appears to no
easy way to pick one in particular; your editor started with Tomato
because the screen shots looked nice and the installation
instructions were straightforward.”

Complete Story