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FAQ

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Alexander Ryzhov edited this page Apr 1, 2016 · 15 revisions

Most Frequently Asked Questions

These FAQ are designed to provide a better understanding of Entware. It provides basic information, sometimes about fairly complex topics, and will often link to more detailed information.

Q: I read somewhere that I need to install Entware to add feature X to my router. Do I need to rebuild anything from this Git repository?

A: No. Please search (google, etc) or contact the maintainers of your router's firmware for instructions on how to install and setup Entware on your router. Some of the more popular setups are listed in the USB-Storage-setup page of this wiki.

This project publishes compiled binaries for users, so you don't have to build anything.

Q: There is a well known Optware repo, is this another copy of Optware?

A: No, currently Entware is considered to be a different project than Optware, even though there are commonality and similarities. The main reasons that Entware got founded is:

  • To make OpenWRT repo (with all its bleeding edge technologies) available for Optware users.
  • To add some kernel 2.6 features, not available for Optware (where very old toolchain gcc 4.1.1 + uClibc 0.9.28 is used). Optware is incompatible with modern software needs, such as posix_memalign\posix_fallocate\epoll and etc.
  • To add new packages, which was not available before.
  • Optware feeds seem to have been abandoned as the repository (http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/) haven't had an update in a few years.

Q: Where have all packages gone? Only a dozen seem to be available.

A: We have moved the binary packages from Googlecode to our own hosting, after running opkg update && opkg upgrade you will be redirected to new hosting automagically. If you don't want to run opkg upgrade for some reasons, please edit /opt/etc/opkg.conf using this one as an example.

Q: Which platforms are supported?

A: Two feeds are available: entware — for MIPSEL hard-float based devices and mipselsf — for MIPSEL soft-float based devices. Both are MIPS R1 compatible.

Mipselsf also can be used on hard-float based platforms, as long as most well-known MIPS SoC's have no full-blown FPU unit, floating point calculations can be executed twice faster by switching to mipselsf feed. But who cares:)

Entware packages will not work on ancient linux 2.4 kernel based firmwares, because Entware's uClibc uses kernel 2.6 syscalls.

Q: Where is the ARM feed?

A: The ARM feed is available as separate fork.

Q: My favorite package was updated, I want the previous version back!

A: There is a huge archive of packages which you can roll back to:

cd /opt/tmp
wget http://old.entware.net/binaries/mipselsf/archive/mc_4.8.10-1_mipselsf.ipk
opkg --force-downgrade install ./mc_4.8.10-1_mipselsf.ipk

You may disable automatic update for chosen package by:

opkg hold mc
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