14 DAY TRIAL // Linksys has just announced its new WRT1200AC 2x2 Dual Band Wireless AC Router at CES 2015. It might sound like just another router, but this is interesting because it also comes with OpenWrt support by default.
Let's get the obvious things out of the way. WRT1200AC operates in the 2.4 & 5 GHz bands, it comes with a 1.3 GHz dual-core ARM v7 processor, feature two antennas, it has 4 Gigabit LAN ports, 1 Gigabit WAN port, 1 USB 3.0 port, and 1 eSATA/USB 2.0 port, it features FAT, NTFS, and HFS+ support for the file system. It also has 128MB Flash memory and 512MB DDR3 RAM, which should be more than enough for high traffic jobs. The price is $180 (€150) now.
The fact that a router maker takes into account beforehand that some users will most likely get their router flashed with another operating system is quite interesting, albeit not unique. The companies have started to realize that people do this more often than before and they are getting ready for the waves of users who customize the routers.
OpenWRT support is important
There are a couple of open source alternatives for routers out there and OpenWRT is one of them. The makers of this OS, which is Linux based, have been very active in the past year, so it stands to reason that Linksys would consider pushing an open source driver into their project.
"In collaboration with Marvell, Linksys is happy to announce that the open-source Wi-Fi driver for the WRT1900AC has been released to OpenWrt. This driver has been incorporated into the latest open source firmware image snapshot. This is an initial release, with plans to send the driver to the upstream Linux kernel after refinement. Full open source firmware is planned to be available for the WRT1200AC router at time of release," reads the official Linksys website.
The driver seems to be still in development and hasn't reached the Linux kernel yet. For now, only the OpenWrt users will be able to enjoy it, but once the driver hits the kernel, we might get to see it integrated in a more stable version of the OpenWrt.
In the meantime, you might want to check OpenWRT for yourself, but please make sure that your router is supporter before installing it.