I won’t pretend to understand why the makers of dd-wrt would make all the installation tools Windows executables, but they have.  I mean, it’s a Linux based firmware.  Silliness.

Fortunately I didn’t need Windows to use their tools.  I was able to download their files and run them all under Wine in Ubuntu 10.04 for my Linksys WRT54g without any troubles—until I arrived at Step 20.  Their tftp.exe wouldn’t run under Wine.  Turns out, though, I didn’t need to use their tftp.exe at all.

In case you are not already using Wine, you can find it in Synaptic easily enough.  You should not need to perform any special configurations.

You will want to replace Step 20 with a manual ftp installation of some kind.  I used TFTP.  You can install TFTP through Synaptic or by entering sudo apt-get install tftp at the command line followed by your password when prompted for it.

Either way you’ll want to have a terminal open for the next bit.

Once TFTP was installed I went to my terminal and changed into the directory where my dd-wrt file (mine was called dd-wrt.v24-12548_NEWD_micro.bin) was located on my local machine: cd /path/to/dd-wrt/location

Then I merely ran the following TFTP commands.  Once I entered the first command below I was taken to an FTP prompt (that’s the > pictured in the commands below).  You won’t need to type that; it’s just here to separate the FTP commands from the terminal commands.  You can leave FTP and return to your terminal by typing q or quit at the FTP prompt (and hitting Enter, duh).

tftp 192.168.1.1
> binary
> rexmt 1
> timeout 60
> put dd-wrt.vXX_XXX.XXX.bin

When it worked my terminal returned the message “Sent 1703936 bytes in 2.6 seconds”.

(You needn’t worry much about Step 21 or Step 22 either.)

Also, I was twice prompted by dd-wrt on the router to set a password.  Once when I installed it and once again after I hard-reset it (Step 24).  That’s normal.  Just go with it and pick a nice complex secure password.

You can find the instructions for installing dd-wrt on a WRT54g v5 here.  Just remember to refer to the above when you get to Step 20 (if you are using Linux).  Their site has a strong catalog of routers which can run dd-wrt.  Hopefully yours will be among them.

They also sell certain routers with dd-wrt already installed in case that’s a better starting point for you.  Check out their home page.

Good-bye Windows.